Ultimately what will tell the tale is life expectancy and death rates. We already kind of sucked at life expectancy, so I expect we underperform on that in COVID world too.
Life expectancy so far has been pretty shocking drop.
Horrifying, especially among certain native populations that have seen 6.5 years of erosion. Hopefully the news gets better. My fear is that we are going to give up most of the public health gains from things like smoking cessation and air quality improvement.
Smoker mortality rates are ballpark 3X the mortality rates of non smokers. I donāt think even a pandemic like COVID comes close to turning back the clock on that stuff. Longevity improvement is at its core a math problem. You can figure out how much higher mortality rates need to trend to reverse past gains and its a lot. Overall mortality rates improved by about 1% per year for the whole 20th century.
Update on bivalent moderna booster effects. Got the booster at noon on Saturday. Started feeling it around 7/8:00. Had a rough night and didnāt sleep much. Started feeling better Sunday morning. Napped Sunday afternoon and felt 100 percent better by Sunday evening. A+, would boost again.
This was my 5th moderna shot since January of 21.
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If life expectancy is calculated by recording the average age of those who die, it should bounce back up as COVID deaths tail off.
How is life expectancy calculated? I actually donāt know this.
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Depends if they are tailing off. 2021 had more US COVID deaths than 2020. 2022 I think better in recent months, but reporting has gotten a bit more patchy at the state level.
Smoker mortality rates are ballpark 3X the mortality rates of non smokers. I donāt think even a pandemic like COVID comes close to turning back the clock on that stuff. Longevity improvement is at its core a math problem. You can figure out how much higher mortality rates need to trend to reverse past gains and its a lot. Overall mortality rates improved by about 1% per year for the whole 20th century.
It will depend on a lot of factors (effects of repeated infections, scientific advances on therapeutics and vaccines, how the virus mutates, secondary effects on the health care system)ā¦ Studies are pretty consistent in finding increased mortality post COVID even from mild cases, mostly from strokes and more coronary issues, but not 3x so far. Im just pretty bearish on what is going to happen to the healthcare system if we get another winter surge and pretty concerned about what repeated infections do the body. Definitely still wide range of outcomes, we dont have answers to a lot of questions yet.
I believe it is an average, so lots of younger deaths will pull it down. Back when life expectancy was in the 50s or 60s a big reason was because the infant mortality rate was higher, thus bringing the average down. But if you lived past 5 years old your expectancy went up to 70 or so.
Note that I have no qualifications to speak on this and am just recalling what Iāve heard/read when looking into the topic a while back, so it could be all wrong.
Life expectancy in year X is calculated as follows:
A very sexy actuary such as yours truly will gather vast quantities of data for year X. In year X we will count for each age i = 1, 2, 3, ā¦ , 100 two things:
The number of people age i at the beginning of the year = n_i
The number of people that are age i that die in the year = d_i
Then we calculate the mortality rate for each age in year X: q_i = d_i / n_i. Sometimes this step includes some actuarial magic to smooth out the mortality rates because in practice you end up with noise in the annual data.
The life expectancy in year X is calculated as the expected lifespan of a person that has a probability of dying in year 1 equal to q_1, a probability of dying in year 2 of q_2, etc. Life expectancy is not directly calculated as the average age at death in year X, for example, although obviously those things are related.
A big benefit of doing it the actuarial/demographer way is that you can also calculate things like life expectancy at age 65 from the set of mortality rates in a given year.
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i assume covid fucked with this stuff pretty badly
You can see all the mortality rates go up in 2020 and 2021. But the math all works the same.
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Yes but the debate rages on what those improvements will actually look like. The old rule of thumb was that mortality rates improved by about 1% per year. So if, say, an average 85 year old in 2019 had a 6% chance of dying in 2019 then all else being equal weād expect the average 85 year old in 2020 to have roughly a 6% x 99% = 5.94% chance of dying in 2020. It doesnāt seem like much but it adds up over time. The rough 1% / year improvement in mortality rates was about the average over the entire 20th century, so compounded over long periods of time it creates dramatic shifts in longevity. The 20th century was also amazingly egalitarian in this regard - not all groups progressed equally, of course, but across almost all groups I can think of (rich/poor, male/female, white/black, etc.) the 20th century produced big leaps in life expectancy.
Anyway, there are lots of open questions on the future of mortality improvement. My best guess is that the relentless trend of technological improvement will tend to continue to support longer lifespans, but the access to improved technology will become increasingly limited to the most affluent. And stuff like climate change is going to slam poorer people the hardest in most ways including mortality. This has the potential for a very dramatic 21st century K-shaped longevity experience. Thereās a good chance that affluent people continue to see improving mortality rates and older ages, but poorer people and other disadvantaged groups will actually see increasing mortality rates. This would be an epic failure on a moral and policy level but itās very much in the cards.
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Vermont started doing state run walk-in bivalent shots today.
Wife just got hers, but had to stand in line for 90 minutes.
I thought that amount of waiting in line was reserved for Disney parks or black people trying to vote.
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Thatās the whole ball game for this, and guns, and health care and everything else. That it will inevitably hurt minority communities more.
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Zero masks at the WH for Obamaās portrait unveiling, no distancing, lots of close contact. Covidās finally over again.
TIL that mask mandates are (were?) still a thing in America.
Havenāt been a thing in Czech Republic for nearly 6 months.
Any Moderna bivalent trip reports yet? 3x Pfizer and never really felt a thing. Going to spin the Moderna wheel and am assuming Iāll get slam gaped from what I hear from Team Mā¦
Health Canada last week approved for people 18 and older an adapted version of Modernaās COVID-19 vaccine, which targets both the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Omicron BA.1 variant.
Dr. Caroline Quach, who sits on Quebecās vaccine committee, says Modernaās COVID-19 vaccines are not recommended for people under 30 because they present a higher risk of myocarditis ā inflammation of the heart muscle ā than the Pfizer shot.
She says people under 30 are advised to stick with Pfizer but can choose the new Moderna shot if they prefer.