Skip to content
The methodOpen data
Back to the collection

Age-specific mortality and immunity patterns of SARS-CoV-2

Megan O’Driscoll, Gabriel Ribeiro Dos Santos, Lin Wang

Show all 9 authors

Derek A. T. Cummings, Andrew S. Azman, Juliette Paireau, Arnaud Fontanet, Simon Cauchemez, Henrik Salje

2020 · Nature

Other research
Read the paper
HN score
0
Mentions
10
Readers
8
Months
8
What’s in a score?

In the conversation

Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

10 selected excerpts · 10 total mentions

Philorandroid
Neutral mention · rule
It's not a pot-shot to say that remote learning is ineffective for children. If an environment tailored for education isn't effective, how could a home environment filled with distractions sans any full-time adult motivation be considered an upgrade? Plus, once-in-a-100-years or not, a substantial portion of a generation of kids spent their formative years in a world that enforced physical separation, covered faces and general agoraphobia for a world bearing an unseen, airborne and contagious horror (with a fatality rate between 0.001 and 0.003 for ages 0-19, established since late 2020[1]). Children born during the pandemic have already demonstrated decreased IQs, and that's just in the short-term. We're probably going to see an upward trend in childhood neuroses and maladaptive social behavior in the years to come. [1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
Original comment Largest score declines in NAEP mathematics at grades 4 and 8
s1artibartfast
Neutral mention · rule
Im sorry, but that is missing the point.Any benefit doesn't equal cost/benefit. For some with naturally acquired immunity, Both costs and benefits are amazingly small! If you are a healthy 18 year old (infection fatality 1/100,000)[1] w/o vaccine, plus have previously acquired immunity 13X better[2] than a vaccine 90+% effective, you are talking about about 1/ 10s of millions of chance of death or severe complications IF you are infected. This easily puts it in competition with the more serious vaccine complications. Looking at just two aspects for this hypothetical individual, you could weigh 1/10 million chance of death with no booster vaccine shot VS 17/100,000 chance of bells palsy[3] and a 60% chance of fever, chills and headache. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0 https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on... https://www.fda.gov/media/144413/download
Original comment OSHA to require employers with 100 employees vaccinate or test workforce
timr
Neutral mention · rule
> Your source is a sole paper with one author, the guy who "estimated that the coronavirus could cause 10,000 U.S. deaths if it infected 1%" That's an ad hominem, and a complete mis-representation of what he said at the time. The "guy" is one of the most-cited scientists in the world, and the publication is from the WHO. You just don't like what he has to say, so you dismiss it. But sure, how many other sources do you need? His work is entirely consistent with everyone else... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1 > Our analysis finds a exponential relationship between age and IFR for COVID-19. The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children…
Read the full comment
and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85. Moreover, our results indicate that about 90% of the variation in population IFR across geographical locations reflects differences in the age composition of the population and the extent to which relatively vulnerable age groups were exposed to the virus. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0 > We find that age-specific IFRs estimated by the ensemble model range from 0.001% (95% credible interval, 0–0.001) in those aged 5–9 years old (range, 0–0.002% across individual national-level seroprevalence surveys) to 8.29% (95% credible intervals, 7.11–9.59%) in those aged 80+ (range, 2.49–15.55% across individual national-level seroprevalence surveys) (Fig. 2a). We estimate a mean increase in IFR of 0.59% with each five-year increase in age (95% credible interval, 0.51–0.68%) for ages of 10 years and older. The CDC's current best estimate for US IFR for those under age 65 is 6,000 / 1,000,000 (0.6%). Reduce that by an order of magnitude for those under 50, and another order of magnitude for those under 18: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... And finally, just to show you that the OP's estimate is widly wrong, here's a paper based only on China, from June 2020, citing a correct-for-the-time (but high for today) IFR of 0.66%: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... > Our estimated overall infection fatality ratio for China was 0·66% (0·39–1·33), with an increasing profile with age.
Original comment Israeli Study: Natural Immunity Is 13x Stronger Than Pfizer Covid Shots
AndrewBissell
Neutral mention · rule
> Currently we list 604 thousand Americans dead from COVID, that’s 0.18% of the entire population - not the infected population. Brazil is at 0.23%, and rising fast. Worldwide it’s almost 4 million out of 181M reported cases. That’s over 2% IFR. If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1]. Your analysis is severely flawed from the fact that you are equating the number of…
Read the full comment
"confirmed cases" with "number of infections," but many infections are never confirmed with a test (and indeed never even become symptomatic). The article links to a source to support its 0.15% number, but some others are below: Nature, estimates about 0.5% for USA: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0 World Health Organization, median IFR of 0.27% (0.05% for those under 70): https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
Original comment Renewed questions about the virus, and hard-to-face answers
lhl
Neutral mention · rule
Co-morbidities certainly have an impact on outcomes and explains why the IFR is much worse in certain parts of the world but IMHO it doesn't fully explain the magnitude lower attack rate/spread (50-100X worse in the US). That's still a mystery for which there are many plausible contributors, but I don't think it's so easy to just say it's obesity. In the US, this n=5700 NYC study showed 41.7% were obese [1] (not so different from the current US adult obesity rate is currently of about 42% [2]). Note that age is actually the most reliable predictor for hospitalization and death with COVID-19 [3][4] although you can make more accurate estimates with some other factors as…
Read the full comment
well [5]. Note, based on the age-stratified pyramids, Japan's expected IFR sits right at the top [6], so even if you discount the undercounting of hospitalizations and deaths, there's still a huge disparity to make up. BTW, your argument on flu outbreaks actually lends credence that the mask mitigations have been extremely effective. Here's a recent NHK report on the flu numbers this year [7]: - "The number of patients with seasonal flu in Japan was below 100 during the first seven days of February. That's far below the levels seen before. ... Usually, seasonal flu peaks at this time of year, with the number of flu patients per week ranging between 100,000 and 200,000 people." Flu cases are 1000-2000X less than normal. I'm in Tokyo myself and paying close attention to how people are behaving (and comparing it to the footage and media I'm seeing from the US and other countries) and there's a huge difference in behavior from what I've seen over this past year. If you're disappointed by how the general population behaves here, I suspect you'd be horrified/stupefied by what's going on in the rest of the world. My conclusion is that on a population/public health level, it actually doesn't take all that much effort to contain the spread of the virus (elimination is much harder, although several countries have shown that it can be done, and have reaped the economic & social benefits of doing so). [1] Richardson, Safiya, Jamie S. Hirsch, Mangala Narasimhan, James M. Crawford, Thomas McGinn, Karina W. Davidson, and the Northwell COVID-19 Research Consortium, et al. “Presenting Characteristics, Comorbidities, and Outcomes Among 5700 Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 in the New York City Area.” JAMA 323, no. 20 (May 26, 2020): 2052. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6775. [2] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [3] O’Driscoll, Megan, Gabriel Ribeiro Dos Santos, Lin Wang, Derek A. T. Cummings, Andrew S. Azman, Juliette Paireau, Arnaud Fontanet, Simon Cauchemez, and Henrik Salje. “Age-Specific Mortality and Immunity Patterns of SARS-CoV-2.” Nature 590, no. 7844 (February 2021): 140–45. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2918-0. [4] Levin, Andrew T., William P. Hanage, Nana Owusu-Boaitey, Kensington B. Cochran, Seamus P. Walsh, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. “Assessing the Age Specificity of Infection Fatality Rates for COVID-19: Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Public Policy Implications.” European Journal of Epidemiology 35, no. 12 (December 1, 2020): 1123–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1. [5] Ghisolfi, Selene, Ingvild Almås, Justin C Sandefur, Tillman von Carnap, Jesse Heitner, and Tessa Bold. “Predicted COVID-19 Fatality Rates Based on Age, Sex, Comorbidities and Health System Capacity.” BMJ Global Health 5, no. 9 (September 9, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003094. [6] https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr#age-st... [7] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20210215_26/
Original comment Japan to stage Tokyo Olympics without overseas spectators
fabian2k
Neutral mention · rule
Assuming you're somewhere between 20 and 30, your risk of dying when contracting COVID-19 is somewhere around 0.01%, so 1 in 10,000. I'm not including the chance for severe side effects, hospitalization here (I don't know a good data source for those that is age-specific). That's a lot lower than the risk for older people, but it's still a somewhat high absolute risk. Personally, I'd get vaccinated. The risk even for young people is still there, and it's not that low. The source for these numbers is the following paper, specifically figure 2a: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
Original comment Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK
timr
Neutral mention · rule
The OP correct about best estimates for IFR at a global level, and you shouldn't be dismissing the number out-of-hand. The difficulty with "global average IFR" is that it neglects the massive variation in IFR by age. This Nature paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0 made an attempt to break down the IFR by demographic, and found an almost 100,000-fold difference between the youngest and the oldest groups: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2 As such, the "IFR" for a country is going to vary dramatically with the age of the population. It isn't particularly meaningful to talk about IFR as a single number, but it's decidedly true that for anyone under 60, the risk of death is measured in fractions of a percent. For those under 25, the risk is measured in thousandths of a percent.
Original comment Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank
DangerousPie
Neutral mention · rule
Where are you getting those numbers from? Based on Figure 2 of this paper the IFR for people 35-39 is between 0.01 and 0.1%. So in 130,000 infected people you would still expect between 13 and 130 to die from covid. And that's ignoring all sorts of other issues, like the amount of people that will need to be hospitalised, long covid, etc. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
Original comment France reports three new cases of thrombosis, more deaths after AstraZeneca jabs

Keep following the thread.

More in Other research

More from the same topics.