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

Sammy Zahran; Levi Altringer; Ashok Prasad

In the next section, we first explain the statistical and theoretical inadequacies of the elderly share variable as a proxy for elderly frailty. After that, we advance the less confounded metric of elderly longevity -life expectancy at 65. We discuss how elderly longevity is linked to health frailty. In Section 3, we present bivariate results showing how life expectancy at 65 adequately accounts for the puzzling distribution of death rates across Europe and might also be partially involved in the timing of a country's epidemic (as indicated by the first COVID-19 death). Next, we present least squares regression results, introducing statistical controls of hospital bed capacity and a proxy for epidemic seeding risk, inbound international tourists.