Covid-19 kills old people. So do most other diseases

Covid-19 is hard on the elderly, with those 65 and older accounting for 80% of the US deaths from the disease for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released demographic data. But this is true of most illnesses: In 2018, 78% of all US deaths from internal causes (that is, excluding accidents, murders, overdoses and the like) were among those 65 and older.
Assessing the risks posed by Covid-19 has become a morbid global pastime. So has weighing them against the risks posed by other things like seasonal influenza or car accidents or drowning in the pool. A key element in many of these comparisons is the age distribution of the risk. The coronavirus mostly kills people with a limited number of years ahead of them, some have reasoned, so its potential death toll should be discounted relative to that of an ailment or other risk that has a greater effect on the young.
This is not incorrect. But it’s also not a reason to dismiss the threat the disease poses. “When you get old, something kills you,” economist and demographer Lyman Stone wrote on Twitter after sharing some charts that inspired the one above. “But Covid is an extra something. An extra wolf in the pack.”
Seasonal influenza, to which Covid-19 is often compared, is also a disease that preys mostly on the elderly, with the age distribution of its victims often tilted even more toward the very old than that of the coronavirus so far. In 2018, 83% of influenza and pneumonia deaths in the US were among those 65 and older, and two-thirds among those 75 and older. (Many influenza-related deaths are attributed to pneumonia on the death certificates from which the CDC’s detailed age-group numbers are derived, which is why I’ve combined the two here.)

Coronavirus and Flu
The new strains of influenza that cause pandemics don’t always work this way. Only 13% of the estimated 12,469 US deaths in the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic were among those 65 and older, and the elderly’s apparent resistance to that virus was one reason the fatality rate was
so low.
The earlier H1N1 strain that caused the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was much more virulent, causing an
estimated 675,000 deaths among a US population less than a third the size of today’s, and was especially hard on those in their 20s through 40s.
So no, Covid-19 doesn’t seem to be nearly as bad as the 1918-1919 flu! But with its death toll at 74,000 and rising after just two months of significant spread in the US, it is already worse than the worst influenza season of recent years — 2017-2018, with an estimated 61,000 influenza-related deaths. You may also have heard 80,000 cited as the death toll for the 2017-2018 flu season. That was an earlier estimate from the CDC that has since been revised downward, which is a good reminder that all the numbers we have for Covid-19 remain quite preliminary. Given that this pandemic is far from over, though, and that early signs from overall mortality data indicate deaths from the disease have been undercounted so far, the numbers have nowhere to go but up. Their age distribution could change a bit over time, though.
In order to use the age distribution so far to give a sense of the risk posed by Covid-19 relative to other bad things that can happen to people, I’m going to start with 100,000 deaths from the disease over the course of the year as the almost-certain-to-be-exceeded low-end scenario. For the high end, I’ll take the 0.23% of New York City residents who have died from the disease so far and multiply that by the US population, which gets me to a bit above 750,000. That number may seem improbably high, but it’s far from a worst-case scenario in which the disease spreads unchecked (in which case millions would likely die) and it does seem like a useful reference case of what public health officials around the country are trying to avoid. I’ll also run the numbers for 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, a plausible if perhaps optimistic estimate of what might happen if (1) the disease sticks around and has a big resurgence in the fall, as pandemics tend to do, but (2) we get better at treating it and keeping the most vulnerable from catching it.
Here’s how those three scenarios stack up against influenza and pneumonia mortality in 2018. The numbers in the second through fourth columns are simply the estimated mortality (in deaths per 100,000) by age group for each scenario, divided by the 2018 influenza and pneumonia mortality.
For children, the risk of dying from Covid-19 appears to be much less than that of dying from influenza and pneumonia even in the most pessimistic of my three scenarios. From age 15 onward the Covid risk is higher, with the relative difference peaking for those in the 45 through 54 age group, whose risk of dying from Covid-19 in my middle scenario is four and a half times higher than their influenza and pneumonia mortality rate in 2018.

—Bloomberg