Life Lost

25 May, 2020

If you’re a true utilitarean (which I am not) confronted with the Trolley Problem you hopefully have your actuarial tables memorized and are a pretty good judge of age. Who dies matters as much as how many.

Using social security actuarial tables and the CDC death by age data See Excel or the table below. Data as of 5/20 starting 2/1 shows we have 851220 years of life lost.

For Vietnam I’m not super happy with these data sources but obviously deaths were more concentrated in young males. vhfcn.org or militaryfactory.com?. Lets go with 58,148 KIA at a median age of 23.11 years and 1970 actuarial tables show 54.78 life expectancy. 54.78*58148 = 3185347.44

So by this measure we’re not a vietnam level tragedy yet but we are about 25% there after only 3 months where vietnam unrolled over several years so we’ll see. Also remains to be seen what the damage is for those that survived.

Sex	Age group	COVID-19 Deaths	Total Deaths	Life Expectancy	Years of Life Lost
Male	Under 1 year	2	2,567	75.45	150.9
Male	1-4 years	1	507	73.5	73.5
Male	5-14 years	5	792	66.57	332.85
Male	15-24 years	51	6,038	56.85	2899.35
Male	25-34 years	318	12,113	47.65	15152.7
Male	35-44 years	862	16,360	38.56	33238.72
Male	45-54 years	2,370	30,079	30	70317.9
Male	55-64 years	5,522	70,708	22	119164.76
Male	65-74 years	9,090	103,435	14	130623.3
Male	75-84 years	10,358	116,074	8	85764.24
Male	85 years and over	9,132	110,142	4	36984.6
Female	Under 1 year	1	2,078	80.39	80.39
Female	1-4 years	1	392	78	78.43
Female	5-14 years	2	543	71.5	143
Female	15-24 years	25	2,126	61.63	1540.75
Female	25-34 years	145	5,333	51.97	7535.65
Female	35-44 years	324	8,676	42.47	13760.28
Female	45-54 years	968	18,227	33.23	32166.64
Female	55-64 years	2,790	44,540	25	68522.4
Female	65-74 years	5,357	74,840	17	88604.78
Female	75-84 years	8,263	107,176	10	79985.84
Female	85 years and over	13,410	174,291	4.78	64099.8
Both	All				851220.78