It’s always period life expectancy when they report it in the media. That is, they use the mortality rate experience by age, pretend that somebody saw that mortality experience through their life, and calculate life expectancy using that.
I really hate that they do that, but I understand why.
If you’re trying to figure out retirement planning, etc., you should use (projected) cohort mortality to calculate life expectancy (one should actually calculate survival percentiles, but whatever)
You can kinda see where experience shades into projection because it goes smooth around 2000. You can also see 1918 very well there.
So, mortality improvement used to be so rapid, even outside a pandemic year, people born that year had a life expectancy 10 years higher than the life expectancy calculated using that year’s mortality experience.
2 things I learned about COVID mortality reporting in Missouri that belong in news that makes you say WTF:
The coroner in at least one county will omit including COVID as a cause of death on the death certificate at the request of family if there is another contributing cause.
Missouri does not include “probable” COVID deaths in any of their counts.
Aside: what is the jump in January 2018? Flu deaths?
And then the upper bound of excess deaths in January 2020? Is that calculated using the January 2018 deaths?
They have a test for flu and they sometimes test what strain of flu it is to help them predict what to put in the next flu vaccine. And 2018 was shown to be a high flu season at that point via testing. The flu test does not pick up on Coronavirus.
Every so often we have a bad flu year. winter 2017-2018 was bad flu… don’t remember that? Yeah, most of the time people ignore that, except when somebody they knew died. I notice this, because bad flu years often ends up w/ bad life insurance experience for the industry.
The 2020-2021 flu season was incredibly weird – basically, it did not exist
2017-2018 season is in cyan. You can see the nasty peak.
The grey curve, which is out of sync w/ everything else, was 2009-2010, and that was the H1N1 pandemic
An outbreak of respiratory syncytial virus, combined with growing Covid-19 pediatric cases, is straining hospital resources in some U.S. cities.
…
U.S. health officials have expressed concern over a simultaneous rise in Delta infections and cases of respiratory syncytial virus, a highly contagious seasonal flulike illness that is more likely to affect children and older adults.
Cases of R.S.V. have risen gradually since early June, with an even greater spike in the past month, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The illness, which can cause symptoms that include a runny nose, coughing, sneezing and fever, normally begins to spread in the fall, making this summer spike unusual.
Didn’t someone post some articles about a study or postulation of viral interference. Something about one virus that surges actually pushes out other viruses abilities to infect or something like that? Now that COVID has gone down (and we aren’t disinfecting like we did initially) the other viruses are coming back. With a vengeance?
I had been looking at viral interference theories, but I hadn’t seen anything about other viruses roaring back after a different one got a vaccine… [and, of course, the kids age 0-4 aren’t getting COVID vaccines, for the most part. But there is an RSV vaccine, but maybe the kids haven’t been getting it…]
Maybe because our “wellness” appointments when pediatricians give the normal slew of vaccinations have been disrupted for 18 months? Or maybe because our immune systems really do need practice?
