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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

> It’s glaringly obvious that an extra 1,000 deaths of individuals over 50 every single day for nearly 3 years would have an effect on the electorate…

COVID killed older and more vulnerable people disproportionately. I’m curious how much this cannibalized the typical mortality rates (categories?) for these groups. That is, what percentage of these individuals would have died over those two years anyways? I imagine this has been studied but I can’t find any sources (and the internet is full of conspiracy junk on this topic.)

Is it statistically significant at all? Or is it truly an extra 1000 deaths per day?

(I’m not implying it would be so significant as to change the point being made… I’m intuiting maybe a few percent)

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People really overestimate the mortality rate for people over 50... here are the actual mortality stats for the US: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

On average, a 50 year old is going to live another 30 years. Even a 74 year old is going to live an average of another 12 years.

People tend to think that average lifespan works like "take average lifespan, subtract your age, and that is how long you can expect to live" This isn't true, however, as you approach the expected lifespan of the population as a whole. Most people alive will keep living for a while, even if you are pretty old.

Even an 80 year old is likely to live another 8 years on average.

So yes, increased mortality for old people kills people who would be alive for many more years on average.

Very true. But that doesn’t account for people with existing conditions. I imagine I could just see if there’s any noticeable dip in non-covid causes of death… Though I suspect those numbers might double count depending on how the data is counted. Ie. SARS-COV2 killing a cancer patient is probably counted as multiple causes of death.

Though, again, I reassert that I’m not expecting it to be a big number. Just curious if it’s even measurable.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v...

> IFR of COVID-19 among non-elderly populations in the pre-vaccination era is substantially lower than previously calculated (4-8,59), especially in the younger age strata. Median IFRs show a clear age-gradient with approximately 3-4-fold increase for each decade but it starts from as low as 0.0003% among children and adolescents and it reaches 0.5% in the 60-69 years old age group.

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