Summary: The weeks-long delay in administering millions of distributed vaccines will cost thousands of lives. How many people will die because we are slow to get out the vaccine? The majority of distributed vaccines have still not been administered. As of today, January 13, the CDC reports about 9 million people have been vaccinated, about […]
ARTICLES
Infection Fatality by Age
Abstract If the overall Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is .006, what does this mean for the IFR by age? Assuming that the infection rate is the same at all ages, the IFR at an age equals the overall IFR times the ratio of the COVID death rate at that age to the crude COVID death […]
COVID-19 Berkeley Demography Brownbag Virtual Chat with Jessica Metcalf (Princeton) and David Reher (UCM, Spain)
Since the epidemic began, we’ve been doing virtual brown-bag seminars, with speakers from Berkeley and around the world. Jessica Metcalf, and epidemiologist and demographer at Princeton and David Reher, an historian and demographer at the University Complutense of Madrid, both gave wonderful talks. Afterwards they responded to some of the chatroom questions by email. (Thanks, […]
A new, individual-level mortality data set built from Social Security Administration mortality data
The CenSoc team at UC Berkeley is excited to announce the release the Berkeley Unified Numident Mortality Dataset (BUNMD). The BUNMD is a microlevel dataset providing researchers access to over 49 million US mortality records, including nearly complete coverage of deaths to individuals 65+ from 1988-2005. The demographic covariates and fine geographic detail allow for […]
Forecasting Covid-19: An annotated chat transcript of Adrian Raftery’s recent Berkeley Demography brown bag
The brown bag seminar in the Berkeley Demography Department has been all Covid-19 all the time the last few weeks. This week we had a terrific panel made up of Adrian Raftery from the University of Washington together with Berkeley’s own Nicholas Jewell and Joseph Lewnard. Our format is that while the speakers are talking […]
Epidemic Mortality Risk Differences Among U.S. States
COVID-19 appears to be more dangerous for the elderly and for those already suffering from poor health. Because this is the same pattern as all-cause mortality, we can already predict which states in the country face the biggest threat from the virus. In this post, I describe the pattern of existing mortality inequality in the […]
Young Adult Excess Mortality During the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic
When we consider the consequences of Covid-19, the Spanish Flu of 1918 is the pandemic that scares us the most. The Spanish Flu was deadly, particularly when it returned for a second time in the fall of 1918. The mortality age-pattern was highly unusual, with deaths in many countries peaking around age 28. (This earlier post discusses […]
The Worldwide Impact of Novel Diseases
Novel diseases are likely to be most risky for specific ages and sexes. The challenges posed by Covid19 are playing out at this time on the global stage. Demography tells us where this, and other novel diseases, are likely to have a big impact – because any country’s demography tells us the ages and sexes […]
Recent Influenza Mortality Age Patterns in the Human Cause-of-Death Database
(Note: this post was updated on March 18. A age-specific comparison of flu mortality with all cause mortality was added in the addendum below.) The exact age-pattern of the Covid-19 pandemic is still emerging, with older people clearly at more risk than younger. Meanwhile, the pattern of deaths attributed to influenza in past years can give […]
Welcome
Welcome to “demogblog.” We’ve started this in order to share our work related to demography in general, and especially demographic perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic. Please contact us if you have material to contribute.