Daily Herald Editorial: We may have emerged from the pandemic, but we’re still far from returning to the conditions that preceded it

Scientists can sometimes talk in an impassive jargon of their own, but even by those standards, an infectious disease specialist’s assessment of the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in our communities brought uncomfortably to mind images of overlarge herds of wildlife.

“We have to consider that COVID is going to have an ongoing culling effect on the population, and not just the old,” said Dr. Emily Landon, of the University of Chicago in a story by Jake Griffin on Sunday. “It definitely results in increased risk of other conditions that cause death.”

Culling effect? It’s not exactly sensitive language, but it does place in stark relief the picture of our relative health as we edge away from the worst of the pandemic. The release of 2022 data from the Illinois Department of Public Health provides some justification for the term.

As Griffin reported, the nearly 123,000 Illinoisans who died in 2022 represented a 16.6% increase over the average annual deaths in the state for the 10 years leading up to the pandemic. COVID-19 accounted for 7,149 of the deaths, still qualifying as the fourth-largest cause of death in the state.

But it’s important to note that those numbers apply to deaths that can be directly linked to COVID-19. Implications from other causes of death can compound the cause for concern, for even as the COVID deaths decline, deaths from diseases affected by COVID continued to increase.

Notably deaths from heart disease and stroke increased substantially during the pandemic years of 2020 to 2022, 4.9% and 11.8%, respectively, and National Institutes of Health research suggests that the risk of those diseases continues to be elevated for people even after they’ve recovered from a COVID infection.

And beyond these obvious disease relationships, Griffin also noted data showing that factors seemingly unrelated to COVID-19 ― in particular accidents and homicides, especially homicides of females ― appear to be growing beyond the rates at which they were found before 2020.

All this suggests there’s more going on here than vaccines, as important as they are, can help. The culprit may not be quite as simple as a weakening of social safety nets, but as IDPH Director Dr. Sameer Vohra observed, that surely can be seen as a factor. And, beyond the practical considerations, it seems obvious that “for whatever reason,” again quoting UC’s Landon, we just are not taking care of ourselves as well as we did before the pandemic.

Perhaps this, too, is a vestigial condition demonstrating how dramatically COVID-19 disrupted not only our individual physical makeup but our social psyche as well. Certainly, it shows we have to do more, as individuals and as a society, to restore behaviors that were serving us much better before the pandemic than they are now.