February 26, 2021
This is the same CDC that we allowed to shut America down.
CDC estimated a one-year decline in life expectancy in 2020. Not so — try five days
In science accurate predictions verify a theory; failed predictions falsify it. This shows the CDC is not doing good science at a minimum.
The CDC’s mistake? It calculated life expectancy using an assumption that is assuredly wrong, which yielded a statistic that was certain to be misunderstood. That’s exactly the type of misstep the agency can’t afford to make. Not now, not after former President Trump’s relentless attacks on its credibility. Not after his advisers were caught altering and editing the agency’s monthly reports to downplay the pandemic.
advertisement
To review: The CDC reported that life expectancy in the U.S. declined by one year in 2020. People understood this to mean that Covid-19 had shaved off a year from how long each of us will live on average. That is, after all, how people tend to think of life expectancy. The New York Times characterized the report as "the first full picture of the pandemic’s effect on American expected life spans.â€
But wait. Analysts estimate that, on average, a death from Covid-19 robs its victim of around 12 years of life. Approximately 400,000 Americans died Covid-19 in 2020, meaning about 4.8 million years of life collectively vanished. Spread that ghastly number across the U.S. population of 330 million and it comes out to 0.014 years of life lost per person. That’s 5.3 days. There were other excess deaths in 2020, so maybe the answer is seven days lost per person.
No matter how you look at it, the result is a far cry from what the CDC announced.
So to project the life expectancy of people born in 2020, the CDC assumed that newborns will face the risk of dying that newborns did in 2020. Then when they turn 1, they face the risk of dying that 1-year-olds did in 2020. Then on to them being 2 years old, and so on.
Locking people into 2020 for their entire life spans, from birth to death, may sound like the plot of a dystopian reboot of "Groundhog Day.†But that’s the calculation. The results: The CDC’s report boils down to a finding that bears no relation to any realistic scenario. Running the 2020 gauntlet for an entire life results in living one year less on average than running that same gauntlet in 2019.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:54 AM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
Post contains 415 words, total size 4 kb.
Posted by: Jayce Cronin at February 10, 2022 02:52 AM (iphZV)
Posted by: Jayce Cronin at February 10, 2022 02:58 AM (iphZV)
Posted by: Jayce Cronin at February 10, 2022 03:01 AM (iphZV)
Posted by: Deejay at May 09, 2022 06:39 AM (jHcpB)
Posted by: Deejay at May 09, 2022 06:49 AM (jHcpB)
37 queries taking 0.6527 seconds, 163 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
