Tag: age groups

Preliminary results for 2021 All-Cause U.S. Mortality: 21% More Deaths than 2019, 2% More Deaths than 2020

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/preliminary-results-for-2021-all?s=w

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As you can see from the annotation on the graph, so far there have been 2% more deaths reported in 2021 compared to 2020. You can see that there had been a spike of deaths at the beginning of 2021, then a quiet spring/early summer. I did not extend my graph into 2022, but the heightened mortality of later/summer fall into winter has continued into winter at the beginning of 2022.

For the record, the 1% increase in deaths from 2018 to 2019 was pretty common before, driven by regular growth of the aging population of the U.S.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 3 April 2022

Publication Site: STUMP at substack

Motor Vehicle Accident Deaths, Part 2: Age-Related Trends with Provisional Results in 2021

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/motor-vehicle-accident-deaths-part?s=w

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The rates are per 100,000 people for the year, but the point is who has the highest, and we see that the answer is:

For 2019: age 85+

For 2020: age 20-24

I threw in the age 15-19 group as ringers, by the way. When we get to all the age groups, they’re not even #4 in the ranking.

Just in that little table, you can see that the rates went up for the youngsters and dropped for the seniors. Think about why that might be.

As noted in my polling question, I’m not adjusting for the number of miles driven, and I’m not going to dig for that data now. But would you like to make some assumptions about the driving habits of these different groups? Especially during the pandemic?

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 2 March 2022

Publication Site: STUMP at substack

Boomers Who Left Jobs During Pandemic Aren’t Claiming Social Security: Study

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/12/30/boomers-who-left-jobs-during-pandemic-arent-claiming-social-security-study/

Excerpt:

The research showed that the rate at which older workers left employment increased dramatically during the pandemic. 

This was especially the case with women — an 8-percentage-point increase vs. 7 points for men; Asian Americans — a 13-point increase; those with less than a college degree — a 10-point increase; and workers with occupations that did not lend themselves to remote work.

….

There was one exception: Workers 70 and older were 5.9 percentage points more likely to leave the workforce and retire. The study noted that these workers were likely already receiving Social Security benefits, so claiming did not markedly increase.

Among all workers 55 and older, the monthly claiming rate for Social Security benefits remained constant between April 2019 and June 2021, the researchers found.

Author(s): Michael S. Fischer

Publication Date: 30 Dec 2021

Publication Site: Think Advisor

Top Causes of Death by Age Group, 2020: Death Rates

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/top-causes-of-death-by-age-group-0bf?justPublished=true

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I present the rates in percentages, as opposed to the more traditional number (which is per 100,000 people per year), because I do not want people to get this confused with the raw counts of people who died. Yes, that does mean there are a lot of small numbers. For children, I even had to extend some out to 4 decimal places to get a significant figure.

In adulthood, natural causes of death tend to increase in rate with increasing age. More below.

External causes (accidents, homicides, and suicide) will have the similar rates over broad ages but drop dramatically in ranking with increasing age — as the natural causes become more likely to occur.

COVID has a similar pattern in mortality as heart disease — indeed, the heart disease death rate is approximately twice that of the COVID death rate for the entire age range from 15 to 85+ on the table.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 22 Jan 2022

Publication Site: STUMP at substack

Older Drivers Are More Likely To Die Driving Older Cars

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://jalopnik.com/older-drivers-are-more-likely-to-die-driving-older-cars-1848181524

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The average age of cars on the road keeps going up, and as these cars get older they are becoming less suited to the drivers most likely to own them. A new study from the IIHS says that older drivers are at much greater risk of getting hurt or killed in their so-called “retirement cars.”

According to the study, drivers 70 and over are sticking with their older cars, which lack modern safety features. As driver age goes up, so does the likelihood of death in accidents by some pretty staggering figures. Drivers who are over 75 are four times as likely to die in a side-impact crash, and three times as likely to die in a frontal crash than drivers who are middle-aged, per the IIHS.

Author(s): José Rodríguez Jr.

Publication Date: 8 Dec 2021

Publication Site: Jalopnik

Simpson’s Paradox and Vaccines

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://covidactuaries.org/2021/11/22/simpsons-paradox-and-vaccines/

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So what the chart in the tweet linked above is really showing is that, within the 10-59 age band, the average unvaccinated person is much younger than the average vaccinated person, and therefore has a lower death rate. Any benefit from the vaccines is swamped by the increase in all-cause mortality rates with age.

I have mocked up some illustrative numbers in the table below to hopefully show Simpson’s Paradox in action here. I’ve split the 10-59 age band into 10-29 and 30-59. Within each group the death rate for unvaccinated people is twice as high as for vaccinated people. However, within the combined group this reverses – the vaccinated group have higher death rates on average!

I and others have written to ONS, altering them to the concerns that this data is causing. It appears from a new blog they have released that they are aware of the issue and will use narrower age bands in the next release.

Author(s): Stuart Macdonald

Publication Date: 22 Nov 2021

Publication Site: COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group

5 States Where Young-Adult Deaths Are Spiking

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/10/15/50-states-of-mortality-spike-data-for-the-25-44-age-group/

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In the first two weeks ending in September, the number of deaths of U.S. residents in the 25-44 age group spiked to 8,604.

The number of deaths of people in that age group was 22% higher than it was during the comparable period, and 57% higher than it was during the comparable period in 2019 — before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

In the first half of 2021, which included the January spike, the number of deaths of people in the 25-44 age group was 38% higher than in the first half of 2019.

There are about 87.4 million people in the 25-44 age group in the United States, according to the Census Bureau.

Author(s):Allison Bell

Publication Date: 15 Oct 2021

Publication Site: Think Advisor

Vaccines Reduce Risk: A Look at the Changing Age-Related Mortality Risk of COVID

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/vaccines-reduce-risk-a-look-at-the

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I will put a few facts in front of you, and you think it through:
– The population age 85+ in the U.S. in 2020 was 6.3 million
– Through July 2021, there were a little over 180K COVID deaths for that group
– That’s about 3% of the age 85+ population

Do you think only 3% of the age 85+ population is vulnerable to COVID?

Pretty much all of them are “vulnerable”. The mortality rate for people age 85 (much less older) was 7.3% for females and 9.5% for males in the most recently available tables. It only goes up from there.

There is a huge difference in mortality by age for just non-pandemic years, and it’s also true for COVID.

There may be a few hardy souls with a base risk similar to the middle-aged without vaccines, but the percentage is not high.

The vaccines have been having an effect in cutting risk.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 18 Oct 2021

Publication Site: STUMP at substack

Young American Adults Are Dying — and Not Just From Covid

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-18/young-american-adults-are-dying-and-not-just-from-covid

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The observation that downward mortality trends have reversed in recent years for some groups of Americans is not new. Economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton helped start the discussion with their 2015 paper on rising mortality among middle-aged, non-Hispanic White Americans, and subsequently gave the phenomenon a resonant name: “deaths of despair.” Research has also identified those without college degrees and rural Americans as especially troubled.

In March, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee summed up the current state of knowledge in a 475-page report on “High and Rising Mortality Rates Among Working-Age Adults.” Advances in overall life expectancy stalled in the U.S. after 2010 even while continuing in other wealthy countries, the committee summed up, attributing this mainly to (1) rising mortality due to external causes such as drugs, alcohol and suicide among those aged 25 through 64 and (2) a slowing in declines in deaths from internal causes, chiefly cardiovascular diseases.

Author(s): Justin Fox

Publication Date: 18 June 2021

Publication Site: Bloomberg