ABOUT THAT STUDY PURPORTING TO SHOW THAT COVID-19 TAKES AN AVERAGE OF TEN YEARS OFF A VICTIM’S LIFE: This study got a lot of attention in the U.S. media, but it has a glaringly obvious flaw. As an online commenter on the paper (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) wrote to the authors, “you are implicitly assuming that the people who are dying are more or less representative of the average, which seems like a major assumption that, if untrue, would render your conclusions pretty useless. I hope I’m missing something here because it would seem far more intuitive to assume that people who are dying are the most vulnerable of their respective cohorts.”

Indeed, not only would it be intuitive, but we know that a wildly disproportionate percentage of the fatalities have been residents of nursing homes. Residents of nursing homes are there because they are quite ill and can’t take care of themselves. There is zero reason to think that a nursing home resident with disease X has a similar life expectancy to the average person of the same age with disease X, and there is every reason to believe (a) that their life expectancy is lower; and (b) that because they are sicker, if they catch Coronavirus they are more likely to succumb to Covid-19. One would expect that even “otherwise-healthy” people who succumb to Covid-19 would, on average, be more likely to have an undiagnosed health issue than those who don’t, and thus have a lower life expectancy. When called on this by commenters, the lead author responded that the authors were aware of these issues, but “we would be surprised if this had a large enough effect to result in a substantial decrement in life expectancy.” This strikes me as being so attached to one’s thesis that one is willfully blind to its fatal flaw.