An article about recent stats in our county...
https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus...-february.html
The last line of the article states that, "All told, 734 people have died of the coronavirus in the county during the pandemic."
Our county has a population of approximately 460,000 as of 2019 (most current data I could find quickly).
In 2018, in our county, 899 died of cancer, 895 died of heart disease, and "unintentional injury" was a distant third with 241, followed by chronic lower respiratory disease at 216, and cerebrovascular disease at 200.
https://apps.health.ny.gov/public/ta...eports/#county
Those figures are per year, and the 734 covid deaths cited earlier are since the pandemic began (longer than a year). Additionally, a significant portion of those covid deaths would seem to overlap the other categories (other than "unintentional injuries") as comorbidities. I wish I could find more current data online, but I couldn't... nothing that lists Covid deaths alongside those other causes in a similar chart. Even if every Covid death was 100% due to covid, i.e., an additional death on top of the ones accounted for by the other causes, it would still come in third place by a pretty good margin to cancer and heart disease. That, undoubtedly, is not the case anyway; it seems to be a recognized fact that most covid deaths occur when significant comorbidities are present.
Soo.. take heart. Covid is almost never a death sentence. Someone walking by you, even if they carry the virus, will almost never cause you any harm. That does not mean that there is NO chance of severe harm coming to you from Covid... there is always a chance of something terrible happening. We can't reduce that to zero. People who eat healthy their whole lives, exercise regularly, and do "all the right things" still die of heart disease and cancer. More people who do NOT take care of themselves suffer that unfortunate fate, of course.
Covid is the same. We need to take care of ourselves and each other.. take precautions, of course. Remembering that heart disease and cancer are far more common causes of death (and perhaps unintentional injury, CLRD, and cerebrovascular disease, depending upon how the Covid/comorbidity causes are recorded) than Covid, mandates that encourage even a small percentage of badly needed health care personnel to retire or resign don't seem logical, much less constitutional (but that last part is another argument... I'll stick with logical).