Dying soon

Would most covid-19 victims have died soon, without the virus?

 new study suggests not

“Sacrifice the weak”, urged a sign at a protest against Tennessee’s lockdown on April 20th—though whether the person holding it was trolling the other protesters is unknown. Some claim social distancing is pointless, since covid-19’s elderly victims would soon have died of other causes. In Britain many pundits have said that two-thirds of the country’s dead were already within a year of passing away. They cite an estimate made in March by Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London who advises the government.

Mr Ferguson notes that two-thirds was the upper bound of his estimate, and that the real fraction could be much lower. He says it is “very hard” to measure how ill covid-19’s victims were before catching it, and how long they might have lived otherwise. However, a study by researchers from a group of Scottish universities has attempted to do so. They found that the years of life lost (ylls) for the average Briton or Italian who passed away was probably around 11, meaning that few of covid-19’s victims would have died soon otherwise./.../