Demographic science aids in understanding the spread and fatality rates of COVID-19

By J. Dowd, L. Andriano, David M. Brazel, V. Rotondi, Per Block, X. Ding, Yan Liu, M. Mills. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020

876 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Governments around the world must rapidly mobilize and make difficult policy decisions to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Because deaths have been concentrated at older ages, we highlight the important role of demography, particularly, how the age structure of a population may help explain differences in fatality rates across countries and how transmission unfolds. We examine the role of age structure in deaths thus far in Italy and South Korea and illustrate how the pandemic could unfold in populations with similar population sizes but different age structures, showing a dramatically higher burden of mortality in countries with older versus younger populations. This powerful interaction of demography and current age-specific mortality for COVID-19 suggests that social distancing and other policies to slow transmission should consider the age composition of local and national contexts as well as intergenerational interactions. We also call for countries to provide case and fatality data disaggregated by age and sex to improve real-time targeted forecasting of hospitalization and critical care needs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75327cca0cc66f3f9b71a2fa9497a317211dfcf4

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Citations in the corpus

Spread and dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy: Effects of emergency containment measures (2020, background): “55 for estimates based on high data granularity regarding the Lombardy region); and 3) the effect of age structure (56) in terms of differential mobility, social contact patterns, vulnerability, and case fatality ratio [often associated with hyperinflammation in elderly people (57)] would need to be”
Intergenerational Ties and Case Fatality Rates: A Cross-Country Analysis (2020, background): “In fact, Dowd et al. (2020) argue that the high prevalence of infected elderly is key to understand high Italian fatalities.”
Tracking Changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: Evidence that D614G Increases Infectivity of the COVID-19 Virus (2020, positive): “Regression analysis reinforced the result that G614 status was not associated with greater levels of hospitalization but that higher age (Dowd et al., 2020; Promislow, 2020), male sex (Conti and Younes, (B) Weekly running counts of G614 illustrating the timing of its spread in Europe.”