Why rich countries are so vulnerable to covid-19

NEARLY A YEAR into the pandemic, researchers have identified dozens of factors that can increase a person’s chances of dying from covid-19, including hypertension, diabetes and obesity. But the biggest risk factor of all is being old. People in their 60s are twice as likely to die of covid-19 as are those in their 50s; the mortality rate of 70-somethings is higher still. Indeed, the probability of dying from the disease roughly doubles for every eight years of age. This helps to explain why older, richer countries have fared worse than expected in the pandemic, compared to younger, poorer ones.

To estimate a country’s vulnerability to covid-19, The Economist has combined population data from the United Nations with age-specific infection fatality rates (IFRs) for the disease. The latter was estimated using data from Brazil, Denmark, England, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and parts of Switzerland and the United States. From these data we calculated an age-adjusted IFR: the probability that a randomly selected person from a given country would die if stricken with covid-19, assuming access to health care similar to that available in the sample countries.