The Longevity-Frailty Hypothesis: Evidence from COVID-19 Death Rates in Europe

Sammy Zahran; Levi Altringer; Ashok Prasad

By substituting the more readily intuitive (but confounded) share of elderly population ≥ 65 for elderly longevity (life expectancy at 65) we adequately statistically match the puzzling distribution of COVID-19 death rates in Europe. This result also obliges the widely observed fact that the risk COVID-19 mortality increases with age (Verity et al, 2020 , Liu et al, 2020 , Huang et al, 2020 . The correlation between the COVID-19 death rate and elderly longevity holds with statistical control for hospital bed capacity and international inbound arrivals, as well as control for the date of the first recorded COVID-19 death. As shown in Appendix Figure Life expectancy at 65 is not only strongly correlated with the COVID-19 death rate, but also moderately correlated with epidemic timing. Importantly this statistical relationship holds when controlling for the more obvious covariate of timing -the seeding of the virus in Europe from inbound international tourists. This is an admittedly more difficult statistical relationship to interpret, but 7 . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.