Covid's non-impact on life expectancy

February 2, 2021. The average age of the Spanish flu victim was 28, for Covid-19 it is about 85. The deaths per million of the two pandemics differ dramatically. As of October there were just over a million Covid deaths worldwide, compared to twenty million in the 1918-20 pandemic, when the world population was a quarter of what it is today. What is remarkable in the contrast is just how little the experts, scientists, and politicians have learned in the past one hundred years, and just how willing they were this time around to needlessly assert command and control over every element of people's lives.

As an example, here is a excellent review of the overall impact of Covid-19 on mortality. According to the Nobel prize-winning Leavitt's calculations, Covid's impact on global life expectancy has been 1/50,000. This figure is below meaningless; it's absurdly meaningless. And here is another interview with Leavitt from September last year. In brief, the public has been misled and mistreated by venal interests of supposedly 'progressive' politicians, all for the purpose of increasing their control over personal and economic freedom.

An aside is worthwhile here. Note that the pillars of capitalism are two fundamental, natural rights that the government must vigorously protect: the right to own and the right to trade. This means property rights and free trade, honoring and facilitating voluntary exchanges and contracts, building roads and hiring police. All of these efforts are critical to preserving the American lifestyle and pursuing the American Dream, the natural rights of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' that our forefathers articulated almost 250 years ago.

The continuing deluge of data, an increase in candor, and the diligent efforts of a few strong voices to lead the world out of this economic crisis -- the one caused by politicians, not a pandemic -- provide us with some optimism for a real return to normalcy. Not the 'new' normal, just normal. Some slow moving trends have accelerated in the past year, things like online college education and colleges closing, home delivery and curbside service, video streaming and Zoom meetings, working from home and leveraging the internet. These were all quiet trends in the making that accelerated rapidly since March, where American ingenuity and expansive information technology assisted in what could otherwise have been a much worse mess than the politicians have crated.

Biden's ascendency to the presidency harkens back to when my former employer hired a new business dean. The new person had a progressive agenda and said all the politically correct things and to ignore any wisdom or experience in the system she inherited, and then proceeded to destroy a extremely successive business unit with impetuous decisions based more on vanity than upon data or economics, and along the way ended the surplus generated for the mother organization, threatening the entire organization. At the nadir, the organization provided a golden parachute and a transparent joke about her voluntary retirement from her post.