Eleven days in May, revisited

 Well, it's 9/11/2020, so a young man's thoughts flit lightly towards major disasters. A few months (!) back I wrote a post attempting to put the mortality of COVID in perspective, and here we sit; perhaps a longer perspective is now possible.

In the meantime the CDC has released data indicating that the vast majority of Covid deaths had major co-morbidity factors, which bolsters the interpretation that it best be looked at as essentially an acceleration of your remaining days in this vale of tears.

Rather than try to guess how many people actually died of, rather than with, COVID, I simply took the number of people who died of any cause, and compared that to the average non-Covid numbers. You can these stats at the CDC website here.

It now looks like this: 

The initial spike got a longer tail, and there was a second wave, and of course there will be a tail from the second wave you can't see yet due to reporting lag. 

Back in May I wrote that the overall effect of the pandemic had been to reduce everyone's life expectancy by 11 days. What does it look like now?

The low curves are the number of days we were losing per week, the upper ones are cumulative, and the two curves represent the differences from average and statistically significant figures. The "real" number should be between them.

So we lost eleven days in May (actually mostly April), then it slacked off some, and then picked up a bit for the second wave, and is going down again. As of right now we are losing about a day of life expectancy a week, but that is declining. The total amount of life expectancy we've lost so far is closing in on a month.

By the way, remember that average American life expectancy has been improving throughout history. How far would you have to go back to have a life expectancy one month shorter? About to 2010, it turns out. And this decade has been one of abnormally slow life expectancy growth; over the 20th century we typically gained 2 or 3 months a year.

Well, that's one way to look at it, but what's gone is gone. How much more life expectancy can you expect to lose?

To predict the remainder of the loss I fit a curve to the excess deaths. A lognormal curve fits the spikes quite well, as you can see:

The heavy blue curve is actual excess deaths, the orange is a lognormal fit to the first spike, and we add a second lognormal to it for the green, total, curve.  Note that these are in thousands of excess deaths in the US on a weekly basis. You need to compare them to an average 55,000 deaths per week or nearly 3 million a year. 

The total area under the green curve from current date on is just 14,000 deaths, which works out to be 43 hours of life expectancy loss.

 You can all relax now.