Too young to die: Age and death from COVID-19 around the globe
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The risk of death from COVID-19 rises rapidly with age, and the disease is perceived by many people to be principally a danger for the elderly. But just how concentrated are the victims among older people around the world, including in developing countries? We took a detailed look at this question in a new working paper using data from 2020.
We employ two approaches. First, we use official COVID-19 death reports compiled by governments. The weakness to this data is that not all deaths due to COVID-19 infections have been attributed to the disease. It’s possible that the odds of attribution vary by age, which would distort age profiles of COVID-19 deaths. Perhaps, for example, in developing countries where many older people die outside of hospitals and without access to testing, their deaths during the pandemic are less likely to be recognized as being due to COVID-19.
We also used a second approach based on excess mortality estimates, which have been viewed as the “gold standard” for understanding pandemic deaths. These are calculated by comparing the count of recorded deaths (from all causes) to expected deaths, based on past year patterns. We highlight that it is important to take trends into account when estimating expected deaths. Many excess mortality calculations fail to do this and instead use a simple average of past year death counts. We show that doing so results in overestimates of excess mortality.
So, what did we find? The basic estimates are shown in the figure below.
. But the profile is much different in middle-income countries. . . (Unfortunately, we do not have data with an age group breakdown of deaths for any low -income countries.)Is this simply because middle-income countries tend to have younger populations? In a word, no. When we adjust for differences in the age-distribution across countries, the same pattern of much younger profiles of deaths in middle-income countries persists. And among high income countries, one notable outlier is the United States, which has a much younger profile of deaths than its income-level would suggest.
We also estimate age-mortality curves for every country using both official COVID-19 counts and our excess mortality estimates. We show that while mortality rates (deaths/population) rise with age everywhere, they rise less rapidly with age in middle-income countries. In other words, COVID-19 mortality rates are flatter and the risk is less highly concentrated among older people.
Why do these findings matter? The findings demonstrate that COVID-19 is not just a danger to older people in developing countries, where a large share of victims are people of working age. great vaccine divide” that threatens global recovery. Poorer countries have been left behind in the race to vaccinate and solving the vaccination gaps, as the World Bank is working to do, must be a top priority.
These results underline the desperate need to bridge the “Age Distribution of Official COVID-19 Deaths and Excess Deaths in 2020
Notes: Countries with fewer than 2000 official COVID-19 deaths are excluded. Country-age group combinations with negative excess deaths are shown as zeroes. Countries are sorted by 2019 GNI per capita (PPP).
Join the Conversation
Hello! This is a very interesting graphic. I'm curious, the US appears to be a bit of an outlier among high-income countries in the COVID deaths-by-age distribution (a relatively higher proportion of younger folks dying from COVID). Why is this so? Is it because of obesity rates/existing medical conditions at an earlier age?
Best,
Joseph
This presentation has a bias on the first age group.
Considering a group of 0-44 and then groups of 10y only accredits the fact that young children die of or with Covid.
You should split this group into 2 or 3: 0-18, 19-32, 33-44.
There is also a very clear correlation of all the data you show with obesity. Less than 44yo die where obesity is observed.
A retired sociologist friend of mine passed this on to me. I'm a member of the same category.
I wonder whether your main finding might be partly a result of people in the older age groups in developing countries being healthier in comparison to the rest of the population than older people in developed lands. Lack of funds and technology may make it harder to keep people who are in poor health and have weak immune systems alive into old age there.
Just thinking out loud here. Medical sociology was not my field.
It will definitely be interesting to see if the country's left behind in vaccine race rise to the occasion with natural amunity.