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> Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose. How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that

> Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose. How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that life expectancy decreased by 1.18 years in the US due to the pandemic, which doesn't strike me as extreme. 1: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118

adrianN 5y ago
That's 1.18 years despite all the countermeasures the US has implemented.
bena 5y ago
Are you aware how hard it is to move the needle by any significant percentage when you are dealing with sets of millions? Life expectancy is essentially an average of when people die. Not to mention life expectancy was going up. So it not only stopped whatever gains we had, but reversed it by a substantial amount. We were expected to gain 2 years from 2017 to 2030. That's 13 years to go up 2 years. About 2.8 million people die in the US each year. The current life expectancy is about 80 years. To make that 80 become 78.8 is the equivalent of 1.5% of the people or 42,000 babies dying as soon as they were born. Anything that can move the needle that much in such a short time is pretty extreme.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  Yea, statistics can make a case for anything. Life expectancy went down, but the average age of a covid death was 82 years old, meaning half were older than 82. These octogenarians and older are pulling the average life expectancy up every year they continue living. It would be a way different story to have the average life expectancy go down because a bunch of, say, 20 year olds died.
  - bena 5y ago
    Yes, old people living longer pulls up the average life expectancy. That's how it works. And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year. When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal. Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.
    - sjwalter 5y ago
      It depends on how it drops by 1.2 If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens. To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy. Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome. But to you, it's 1.2 either way.
      - hawkice 5y ago
        > nowhere near a tragedy It might be useful to tone down any highly idiomatic usage of English here, because this sounds very weird. edit: sort of has this vibe. me: "I was sad when my grandmother died" hn: "WAAAAYYY off there, buddy."
      - bena 5y ago
        If half are over 82, what does that make the other half? I'll wait for you to figure that one out. 1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened. Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible". I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy. Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?
aunty_helen 5y ago
Life expectancy is a long term trend. Why would you use it to measure the impact of a pandemic? Answer: Because you can hide the one bad year with the last 100 good years of data and trending. Maybe you should use population growth projections from 1970 to 2070 to show that this isn't even a pandemic?

adrianN 5y ago

That's 1.18 years despite all the countermeasures the US has implemented.

bena 5y ago

Are you aware how hard it is to move the needle by any significant percentage when you are dealing with sets of millions? Life expectancy is essentially an average of when people die. Not to mention life expectancy was going up. So it not only stopped whatever gains we had, but reversed it by a substantial amount. We were expected to gain 2 years from 2017 to 2030. That's 13 years to go up 2 years. About 2.8 million people die in the US each year. The current life expectancy is about 80 years. To make that 80 become 78.8 is the equivalent of 1.5% of the people or 42,000 babies dying as soon as they were born. Anything that can move the needle that much in such a short time is pretty extreme.

sjwalter 5y ago
Yea, statistics can make a case for anything. Life expectancy went down, but the average age of a covid death was 82 years old, meaning half were older than 82. These octogenarians and older are pulling the average life expectancy up every year they continue living. It would be a way different story to have the average life expectancy go down because a bunch of, say, 20 year olds died.
- bena 5y ago
  Yes, old people living longer pulls up the average life expectancy. That's how it works. And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year. When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal. Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    It depends on how it drops by 1.2 If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens. To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy. Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome. But to you, it's 1.2 either way.
    - hawkice 5y ago
      > nowhere near a tragedy It might be useful to tone down any highly idiomatic usage of English here, because this sounds very weird. edit: sort of has this vibe. me: "I was sad when my grandmother died" hn: "WAAAAYYY off there, buddy."
    - bena 5y ago
      If half are over 82, what does that make the other half? I'll wait for you to figure that one out. 1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened. Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible". I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy. Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?

aunty_helen 5y ago

Life expectancy is a long term trend. Why would you use it to measure the impact of a pandemic? Answer: Because you can hide the one bad year with the last 100 good years of data and trending. Maybe you should use population growth projections from 1970 to 2070 to show that this isn't even a pandemic?