The Pandemic Blog

WaPo (and other papers) carried a story this morning titled “U.S. life expectancy down for second-straight year, fueled by covid-19”. However, this title is misleading. In 2020, life expectancy declined in many countries, although US life expectancy declined more than in other wealthy countries. Obviously, Covid was the cause of those declines. But you can’t just blame Covid for the 2021 declines, since in many countries that are similarly situated as the US – including Canada – life expectancy rose. Why was there such a difference? One component of the answer is to look at the breakdown by race: Native Americans had the worst outcomes. In fact, their life expectancy fell by almost two years and is now about equal to Haiti’s: 65 years. The main reason for this dismal performance was the terrible Covid death rates among younger Native Americans. However, one brighter spot in the story is that Black Americans suffered a decline of “only” .7 years, while life expectancy of White A...

People who haven’t been vaccinated against Covid often point to the fact that, since Omicron and its variants came to dominate the Covid scene (since last December), being fully vaccinated and boosted doesn’t seem to prevent someone from getting sick with Covid. That’s true, but what it does do is make it much less likely that you’ll die from it. This graph (and the accompanying table) shows that as of July 2, an unvaccinated person of any age is 16.7 times more likely to die if they get Covid than is a fully vaccinated and boosted person. And notice that the gap has itself been growing rapidly all year – meaning it’s becoming more and more disadvantageous (if that’s really the right word. Most people don’t look at death as simply a disadvantage) not to be vaccinated. I realize that most people who aren’t vaccinated aren’t basing their decision on facts (except anecdotal evidence, which of course can justify any decision), so they’re unlikely to suddenly get vaccinated now. But IM...