Patients who die of coronavirus have median age of 78[1], and thus life expectancy around ten years. Younger decedents will have a disproportionate effect on av

Patients who die of coronavirus have median age of 78[1], and thus life expectancy around ten years. Younger decedents will have a disproportionate effect on average life years lost, so using the median life expectancy does tend to underestimate that. On the other hand, the patients who die were probably less healthy than the average for their age before they got infected (e.g., the huge mortality in nursing homes; nursing home patients already had an average life expectancy around a year[3]), which would make us overestimate. Somewhat arbitrarily, let's say those cancel, so a coronavirus death costs ten years of life. The average IFR over all ages is 0.7%[4] from a recent meta-analysis. If we're considering prospective smokers, then I guess we should exclude young children, so let's (again, somewhat arbitrarily) bump that up to 1%. That would mean a coronavirus infection in a random individual (age weighted according to population of prospective smokers) costs 0.1 years of life expectancy. But smokers have life expectancy about ten years[5] shorter than non-smokers! So there's lots you could find to argue about in my rough calculation above, and I agree that patients who don't die immediately still lose some yet-unknown number of quality-adjusted years of life; but unless you think you can find two orders of magnitude, smoking is unquestionably more dangerous. That doesn't mean the coronavirus is harmless, just that smoking is really bad. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e1.htm 2. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html 3. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2010/08/98172/social-support-key-nursing-home-length-stay-death https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2010/08/98172/social-support-key-n... 4. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v4.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v... 5. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...