Dr. Leana Wen, the woman who sounds like Asian reporter Tricia Takanawa from Family Guy, writes an Op-Ed in the Washington Post about pandemic drinking. At the start of the column she releases this tidbit of information.
A new study from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) finds that alcohol-related deaths in 2020 were so high that, for 16- to 64-year-olds, they exceeded the number of deaths from covid-19. Previously, the average annual increase was a little more than 2 percent; between 2019 and 2020, it skyrocketed to more than 25 percent. The largest rise in mortality occurred for people 35 to 44 years old, though rates of death associated with alcohol increased across all age groups.
Opinion | We need to talk about pandemic drinking – The Washington Post
The link to the study shows the number of deaths involving alcohol in 2020. It was 99,017. Her other link provides the CDC data that shows how many died in that age group in 2020 of COVID-19. It was 73,586. But that is not the number that stood out to me the most. In 2019, the year before COVID-19 mass hysteria covered the globe, the study shows 78,927 deaths related to alcohol. This means in a non-COVID year more people died from alcohol than SARS-CoV-2 virus which is billed as the worst killer of all time. I did a quick search to see how many deaths can be attributed to alcohol on an annual basis and found that the number is 95,000.
That means, on average, alcohol always kills more than COVID-19!