A new demographic forecast for Israel projects continuing rapid population growth over the next 20 years, compared with most developed countries. The linked news story on the report is interesting in several respects, but I want to focus on the demographer’s answer to a question about COVID-19:
Regarding the coronavirus outbreak, Weinreb said the pandemic was unlikely to have a large effect on mortality rates or life expectancy.
“Remember, every year, more than 45,000 people die in Israel, about 17,000 of them from heart disease and cancer, so coronavirus is not, on its current trajectory, going to change any of the assumptions used to shape these projections,” he said in the report.
“What we know so far is that the average age of death is 82, and most of those people have had other serious health conditions. So it’s more an important test for the healthcare system and for the political class than a demographically significant event in the population. That will be the case even if, God forbid, deaths head into the thousands,” Weinreb said.
The situation is the same in the United States, where the great pandemic of our time–supposedly–is not even having a perceptible impact on overall death rates. For this we are destroying many thousands of businesses, disrupting hundreds of millions of lives, and potentially killing hundreds of thousands of children.
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