Some of you may have read this recent news article with a depressing and infuriating headline.
Due to the pandemic, eh? Not the response?
The team estimated the expected number of suicides for the period based on past trends with fluctuations in employment factored in. It then compared that number with the actual figure and found a likely increase of 8,088.
In the actual study, Batista et al. estimate that 1260 suicides excess suicides were caused by the unemployment rate being higher than if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
Like the Covid vaccines, the side-effects of the Covid response have been worse among young Japanese females.
People in their 20s had the largest number of suicides related to the pandemic at 1,837, of whom 1,092 were women. This type of suicide accounted for about 30 percent of total suicides for the age group.
Those 19 years old or younger accounted for 377 of the pandemic-related suicides, of whom 282 were women.
The Japanese-language version of this article provided this graph to visualise the numbers of female (女性; light green) and male (男性; dark green) excess suicides by age group from March 2020 to June 2022.
And the situation isn’t getting better, with suicides in the first half 2022 still above the expected trend-line.
In the study, Batista et al. also compare the number of excess suicides with the number of Covid-related deaths for each age group. Even if we pretend like they do that all Covid deaths were from Covid not with it, Japan’s response has been more deadly than the virus even for people in their 50s.
But the average 18-year old has a lot longer to live than the average 80-year old, so Nakata et al. also compare years of life lost due to excess suicides and Covid infections assuming that the average 25-year old Japanese female has 63 more years to live. Even when all Covid deaths are considered to be from not with, life years lost from excess suicides are still higher: 339,000 vs. 330,000.
Thankfully, one of the study authors, Prof Taisuke Nakata of the University of Tokyo, is more honest about the causes of increased suicides among young people than the Kyodo headline writers.
"Women, who have more nonregular jobs than men, tend to be more affected economically, while young people are possibly more likely to be forced into isolation due to behavioral restrictions," Nakata said.
So what is to be done?
"It is important to weigh the risks of curbing coronavirus infections against stopping social and economic activities," said Fumio Otake, a specially appointed professor at Osaka University, calling on the government to shift its policy by taking into account data such as the number of suicides.
"To maintain socioeconomic activities, it is necessary to relax measures, such as shortening the isolation period for infected patients, and shift their focus to people at high risk of developing severe symptoms," said Otake, who is also a member of the government's panel on COVID-19 measures.
Prof Otake has been saying this for a while, for example, in the Nikkei Business article I wrote about in May. But the problem here is that even he won’t admit that the business and event restrictions have been as unnecessary and ineffective as masks. Shortening the isolation period of cases will do little to cure Covid-induced psychological problems from which many Japanese now suffer due to living in a faceless and paranoid society for the last 2.5 years.
By generating anxiety about Covid infections, Japan’s media and government successfully generated demand for the Covid jabs. But many excess female suicides can be thought of as adverse events of this vaccine promotion campaign. Okada et al. found female suicides in Japan correlated with a prefecture’s Covid cases but not Covid mortality, which suggests the media’s hysterical reporting of Covid case numbers has played a role.
Therefore, many people in Japan will need to be cured of their coronaphobia by someone in authority telling them that Covid isn’t the scary monster of a disease the media has made it out to be and that getting infected isn’t a shameful crime.
I can think of just the man for the job.
Anyone who’s willing to be depressed even further may be interested in my review of the scientific literature on suicide and mental health in Japan during the pandemic. It’s as fun as it sounds.
In a country with such an inverted demographic pyramid it goes beyond belief that they would sacrifice their young like this more than is already done.
Are the Japs all dems? Or do they have USA dems working for them, since their lies are blatant?