Covid reporting is rife with statistical murder for the sake of hyperbole. If someone paid attention to the first week of a statistics course they'd learn about sample bias, false causality, cherry picking, Simpson's paradox, etc. Ahem, publication bias. Small wonder mental illness is up with a constant news cycle abusing fallacy to monopolize the public's attention and a status quo of blaming whomever strikes convenience for the disease. Let's just pull some data from this cohort of people who had Covid... and there we have it - Covid causes mental illness. In my state deaths from child abuse outstripped deaths from Covid until a recent outbreak in a couple of nursing homes. Guess we can conclude it causes deaths by child abuse. What's the tragedy reported in the newspapers? School closures forcing children from broken homes out of the only place people cared about their safety and success are now dying from abuse? The generation of poor and minority illiterate 3rd graders who will never catch up? Nope. People literally waiting to die in a nursing home are dying. A tragedy.

Small wonder mental illness is up indeed...

> People literally waiting to die in a nursing home are dying.

This is why I've said from the beginning that impact to life expectancy should be the metric which guides public policy. It accounts for lives of children being worth more than the lives of the elderly, because the elderly have less life to lose.

There is a line on “reading fine print of death benefits”. Kids get nothing if cause of death is suicide.

my life insurance pays out in case of suicide. The first year it doesn't pay for suicide, but I've had it 15 years.