Mark Hayward, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who advises the Centers For Disease Control on its mortality statistics, told Britain’s Independent newspaper the “overall burden of mortality” from COVID-19 in the U.S. could be closer to double the current 75,000 deaths.

That claim is only true if you believe the virus itself is responsible for the lockdowns and their broad bans on non-COVID health care. But it is more accurately viewed as a consequence of policies that can and should be reversed.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times wrote: “ERs have about half the normal number of patients, and heart and stroke units are nearly empty . . . Some medical experts fear more people are dying from untreated emergencies than from the coronavirus.”

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Dr. Santiago Garcia of the Minneapolis Heart Institute says “people are having a hard time reaching out to the physicians.” He notes that one of his colleagues reported a patient losing their eyesight after failing to get to their macular degeneration test, which checks the health of the retina.

Allina Health, which operates 13 hospitals and more than 90 clinics through Minnesota and western Wisconsin, postponed 4,000 surgeries last month, some of them for cancer patients.

The biggest proponent of the “excess mortality is the real COVID-19 count” notion globally is the Financial Times. But Sweden, with comparatively laxer lockdown policies in place, has fared better in terms of excess deaths than other European countries with far stricter lockdowns, well below their calculated 49 percent average increase, at 18 percent.

Deaths caused by people blocked from needed health care should not be labeled COVID-19 deaths. They are more appropriately tagged “lockdown deaths.”