life expectancy

Living with Covid? What does that actually mean?

On: May 29, 2022

What does “living with Covid” mean in Australia in 2022? There is continued pressure on the hospital and health care system, with illness creating disruption in most workplaces. It is likely that life expectancy has reduced by 6 – 12 months.

The impact is definitely substantially worse than a bad flu season, but at the same time it isn’t the catastrophe it would have been without an effective vaccine.

So what should we do about it? My view is that we should continue to look for mitigations that work to limit the spread of Covid19, without having too much of an impact on day to day lives – a vaccination plus strategy. On vaccination, we should make a bigger attempt to vaccinate those who aren’t yet fully vaccinated – the school children in the 5-11 age group are not even 50% vaccinated yet, only two thirds of adults have had their third booster doses. We should be monitoring and improving ventilation and/or air filtration in all public buildings – eg schools, offices, shopping centres. While that will be expensive, the cost of this much illness is quite substantial, even ignoring the human implications. We should continue the cultural change we have started of wearing masks where possible (such as public transport) and staying home when we are sick. Reducing the spread of this disease is worth quite a lot both economically and socially.Continue Reading

Mortality improves but we are still not closing the gap

On: October 21, 2018

In: Demography, Feature, Statistics

Depending on how you measure it, Australia is generally in the top 5 countries in the world for life expectancy. And we continue to improve. But Australia shamefully has an enormous gap in life outcomes between indigenous and non indigenous people. And over the period that of these statistics, while both indigenous and non indigenous mortality has improved, the gap has widened, with standardised indigenous death rates going from 164% of non indigenous rates to 172% of non indigenous rates between 2003 and 2017. So we may be the lucky country, but we certainly aren’t lucky for everyone.Continue Reading

How big is the indigenous gap?

On: May 10, 2015

In: Australian Politics, Demography

This week’s Economist has a sobering article about the gap between black and white america. It included a graphic of various statistics, showing the difference between black and white america on a range of measures. It also showed how the two compared with various countries around the world – forContinue Reading

The gender gap in longevity

On: February 2, 2014

In: Demography, Health care, Insurance

People continue to live longer and longer around the world (for an interesting discussion of how superannuation should respond, see Paul Keating on Cuffelinks), which is mostly good. But different parts of populations have quite different experiences of mortality improvement. The (UK) Institute of Actuaries publishes a regular longevity bulletin. TheContinue Reading

When will Don Draper die?

On: June 23, 2013

In: Demography, Life

Despite watching the first season, I’m not a big fan of Mad Men. One of my regular readers thought that was my feminism coming out, but I think it’s just the lack of likeable characters. Nevertheless, I have to share this estimate of Don Draper’s life expectancy. Hat tip to fellowContinue Reading

Mortality – has the improvement died down?

On: December 2, 2012

In: Demography, Insurance

Mortality has been improving in Australia (and indeed most of the world) for a long time. As my dad found out recently, the life expectancy at birth for a boy born in Australia has improved from 63 when he was born, to 79.7 years now. But there is considerable debateContinue Reading

Monday Links

On: June 11, 2012

In: Demography

A roundup of the links that I’ve found interesting this week: Why the Rules of Language Are Both Arbitrary and Essential, Steven Pinker on the false fronts in the language wars between those who argue that the language has defined rules, and you are either correct or incorrect, and thoseContinue Reading

Have you outlived your contemporaries yet?

On: March 13, 2010

In: Economics, Insurance

My dad, who isn’t competitive at all, asked me recently how old he would have to be before he had outlived 50% of his contemporaries. He suspects he may have passed that age sometime in the past few years. So I’ve been exploring the ABS mortality statistics. If you lookContinue Reading