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| From the HK government interactive map |
That pie chart above is not the average age of death but the average age of contracting the virus. That’s from the HK government dashboard. There is no pie chart of the age of Covid deaths.
It seems there’s a general reluctance to report average age of those who succumb to Covid. You really have to do a bit of digging to find it. In fact, it hasn’t changed since we first found out about the virus back in January: it is overwhelmingly the elderly. And the average age is remarkably consistent throughout the world, around 82. In some countries, that’s greater than their life expectancy.
Instead we get on our dashboard figures on the age of those who get the virus. Which is across the age range. That seems irresponsible, in perpetuating fear, that this virus can “get us all”. Yes it can, but vanishingly few of young healthy people die from it. And that does make a difference. We know it makes a difference. Insurance companies know it makes a difference. Governments know it makes a difference; they recognise this difference in all sorts of ways in areas other than Covid (eg driving licences). Yet, when it comes to Covid, pointing out this obvious fact -- that Covid mainly kills the very elderly and we ought not shut down entire economies to control it -- gets one charged with “killing grandma”.
