“It is important to stipulate a few limitations in this analysis. First off, the sort of simplistic calculation used here to estimate the number of cardiac arrest deaths that are “excess” deaths is obviously hardly a rigorous way of estimating how many people would be expected to die from cardiac arrests in Vermont in 2020, 2021 and 2022 with meaningful precision. Secondly, the sample size here is very small for an epidemiological analysis. There could easily be other factors that are affecting the numbers here that are not readily discernable. What this shows though is a basic trend that is large enough to be unmistakable, and not simply the product of random chance. While this data in itself cannot provide definitive answers, it absolutely and unequivocally provides definitive questions – questions that suggest a novel ‘something’ in 2021 and 2022 not present in 2020 is stratospherically spiking fatal cardiac arrests in Vermont. If this doesn’t meet the threshold for a Public Health Emergency, then nothing does.”