The authors of the paper highlighted today, Andrew J. Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee from the University of Warwick, writing in a Discussion Paper for the German based IZA Institute for Labour Economics, want you to understand just one thing: it’s now irrefutably clear, COVID-19 hits the older members of society hardest.
They use data from China, Italy and the U.K. to show just how dramatic the age/effect curve is; and it’s a log not linear progression. A 50-year old is 20x times more likely to die from a COVID-19 infection than a 20-year old. A 60-year old is 50x more likely to die from infection than a 20-year old.
They urge governments and individuals to look at the charts in their work. Individuals can thus be better informed about their risk and governments should consider designing lock-down exit-strategies to take these now unequivocal facts into account. How so? By adopting a rolling age-release policy. This would have several advantages:
1) It would recognize we can’t wait indefinitely to reopen economies
2) It’d be the safest way to do that before a vaccine is available
3) It’s the strategy least likely to require people being recalled into further rounds of lock-down
4) It usefully plays for time as researchers work on a vaccine; and..
5) It targets the group currently the hardest-hit financially
Lock-downs the world over have turned out to be crab-pot responses i.e. easily entered but very hard to leave. The paper provides some practical science on an intelligent way forward.
If you know anybody in your administration grappling with this I’m sure they’d thank you for forwarding the work which you can access in full via the following link Stayin’ Alive.
Happy, safe, Sunday.