“Who is dying from covid? Why?” – asks some Wall Street Journal reporters. Two slices (original emphasis):
The age data are stark: About 79% of recorded Covid-19 deaths are among people age 65 and over, while people under age 35 account for just 1% of known deaths from the disease. Nearly a third of Covid-19 deaths has hit people who are at least 85 years old, death-certificate data from about 188,000 deaths, the latest available, show.
This elderly population was affected substantially in the springtime, when significant outbreaks hammered northeastern states like New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts and spread through nursing homes. Deaths connected to long-term-care facilities recently topped 81,000 and have consistently made up about 40% of all U.S. Covid-19 deaths, according to a Wall Street Journal tally of state and federal data.
…..
Using the latter method, research suggests the virus kills about 0.6% of people it infects, but estimates vary widely and the rate varies significantly by age. This is far less than the death rate from other serious but less-widespread coronavirus infections—SARS and MERS, also known as Middle East respiratory syndrome—but about six times as deadly as the seasonal flu.
(This last point prompts me again to suggest that we take seriously this question asked last month by Bryan Caplan, but substituting the happier “six” for “ten”: “If coronavirus is ten times worse than flu, perhaps we should make ten times as much effort to combat it, not a thousand times?”)
Ron Bailey reports that the covid-19 herd-immunity threshold might be as low as 15 percent.
No one expected a Lincoln-Douglas debate, but did it have to be a World Wrestling Entertainment bout? Which may be unfair to the wrestlers, who are more presidential than either Donald Trump or Joe Biden sounded in their first debate Tuesday night.
And Eric Boehm understandably is especially appalled by Trump’s utterances.
My colleague Bryan Caplan documents the political-left’s increasing Orwellianism. A slice:
As far as I know, intolerant, thin-skinned, anti-intellectual educators have been around for… well, forever. What has changed is the Orwellian nature of their reaction to dissent.
