It’s been over a year since I’ve commented on the question of whether the response to the Chinese Virus has been appropriate versus overblown. (See this post from July 6, 2020.). Now, with most of the population vaccinated, and the pandemic hopefully winding down, it’s time to take stock of where we are.

During the year and a half since the cases of Covid-19 began to emerge, we have endured seemingly interminable stay-at-home orders and recommendations, “lockdowns,” business closures, millions thrown out of work, school closures, “social distancing,” mask mandates, the cancelation of all in-person social events, concerts, theater, and on and on. And we’re not done even yet. Just today I rode the subway in New York, where the mask mandate is still in place (although the compliance rate is finally dropping significantly). Even now, most office workers in New York have not returned to the office. The business districts remain semi-deserted, although they are beginning to awaken. All this has come about by the edicts of our public health authorities and “experts,” who have done everything in their power to scare the bejeezus out of us.

Was all that appropriate? Absolutely not. The data show quite clearly that for the majority of the population, this virus has been no more dangerous than a regular flu season.

But wait a minute, you say. Haven’t more than 600,000 people in the U.S. died from this virus? That is a very large number in its own right, and certainly far greater than any flu season both as an absolute number and as a percent of the population. (CDC data on the flu for the last 10 years provide estimates of the number of deaths per season ranging from 12,000 in 2011-12 to 61,000 in 2017-18.). To put that in percentage terms, the overall risk of death for an American from Covid-19 from inception to date is about 0.2%; meanwhile, in the worst of recent flu seasons (2017-18), the risk of death for an American has been only 0.02%.

Did you realize that the risk of death from Covid-19 has only been 0.2%?

But there is a huge and important difference ibetween Covid-19 and the flu in that the flu preferentially affects younger people, while this virus had dramatically greater mortality effect on older people. Let’s look at some statistics.

• For the age-related effects of influenza, see Reichert, et al., “The age distribution of mortality due to influenza: pandemic and peri-pandemic,” in BMC Medicine, December 12, 2012: “Pandemic influenza is said to 'shift mortality' to younger age groups; but also to spare a subpopulation of the elderly population.” The mechanism at work is said to be that new influenza strains tend to be closely related to prior strains to which older people have been exposed and have already developed full or partial immunity.

• For Covid-19 it was the opposite: the risk of death rose dramatically the older one got. Here are CDC data on Covid deaths by age cohort through July 17, 2021. Of the 601,000 Covid-19 deaths to date, the 85-and-older group accounts for 178,000, or almost a third. There are only about 6.3 million people in the over-85 age cohort, so the 178,000 deaths for that group represents almost a 3% risk of dying from Covid-19. On the other hand, an 85-year-old already has about a 10% chance of dying within the year (per the Social Security mortality table), while a 90-year-old has an underlying one-year chance of death of about 16.5%, and for a 95-year-old that one-year risk is about 26.4%.

• Risk of death from Covid-19 was similarly elevated for other older age cohorts, although declining rapidly with dropping age. For the 75-84 cohort, there have been 165,000 deaths out of a population of about 16 million, or about 1%. For the 65-74 cohort, it’s about 134,000 deaths on a population of about 31.5 million, or about 0.4%.

• Move on down to the large age cohort of 25-44 years. There have been about 15,000 deaths out of a population of about 68 million. That’s about 0.02% — just about the same as that 2017-18 flu season.

• For the under-25 population, the CDC has recorded only 1,167 Covid-19 deaths through July 17, out of a population of over 100,000,000. That’s a death rate of 0.001% — lower than even the most mild flu season. And for that, tens of millions of kids have been forcibly kept out of school for the year.

The people 44 and under constitute the substantial majority of the population, and for them Covid-19 has either been no worse than, or not nearly as bad as, a regular bad flu season. Why again were their lives turned inside out?

Maybe you think the answer to that question can be found in the dramatic drop in life expectancy brought about by Covid-19. Back in February, the CDC put out a big report announcing that, based on information from the first half of 2020, U.S. life expectancy had dropped by a full year as a result of the pandemic; and the CDC just a few days ago reiterated that estimate based on data for the entire year 2020. A full year drop in life expectancy sounds like a lot. Surely, that is something to be concerned about. Needless to say, those CDC reports immediately drew breathless headlines from the usual suspects: NBC News, February 18, 2021, “Covid-19 cuts U.S. life expectancy by a year in first half of 2020, biggest drop since WWII”; New York Times, July 21, 2021, “U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans.”

Well, guess what: those CDC reports are based on erroneous math. And I’m not talking here about some kind of judgment call on which reasonable people can differ. The CDC calculation is wrong, period. The error may have been innocently made when the first report came out in February, although I seriously doubt it. But the error was pointed out almost immediately. There is no excuse for repeating the error. At this point, it is shameless scaremongering of the population.

The error was promptly identified by a guy named Peter Bach at Stat News on February 25, 2021. To get the full year drop in life expectancy, the CDC applied an assumption that the increased death rates of 2020 from Covid would continue to apply throughout the lifetimes of everyone born during 2020, as opposed to the increased death rates going away after the pandemic passed or a vaccine became available. Bach explains:

The [CDC] calculation is based on a crucial assumption: that for the year you are studying (2019 compared to 2020 in this case) the risk of death, in every age group, will stay as it was in that year for everyone born during it. 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 life expectancy calculation done by the CDC may seem strange, but it’s actually how they usually do it; and for many purposes it is correct. For example, suppose that within 2020 there was a medical advance that provided a cure for some form of cancer. In figuring out how much that cure will affect life expectancy, it is completely appropriate to assume that the cure will remain available throughout the lifetime of anyone born in the year the cure was devised. Fair enough.

But for estimating the life expectancy effect of Covid-19, this calculation is just plain wrong. While Covid-19 will undoubtedly become endemic and continue to exist at some low level, with vaccines and herd immunity the number of deaths should be insignificant after 2021. So what is the real drop in life expectancy from Covid-19? Bach:

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.

For myself, I’m suspicious that the 12 years of life lost per Covid-19 death is a substantial overestimate. But still, the 5 day figure is in the right ballpark. And of course, the figure would be much, much lower for anyone under, say, 50.

Given that the error was identified back in February, there is no longer any theory that repeating the error is innocent on the part of the CDC. It is blatant scaremongering, based on a calculation that they know is erroneous, and that they know the innumerate media (let alone most lay readers) will not be willing or able to critique. Shame, shame, shame. You should not believe anything coming out of this completely corrupt agency.