Time to edit the title of this thread. Misinformation.
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Good news, if true. I saw this post on X, but couldn’t find the original source of the data / graph. If anyone knows the original source that would be great.
Given that a large number of people died due to covid wouldn’t we expect to see a Lower death rate (and therefore greater life expectancy) for a few years afterwards… I’m not sure exactly how the different groups calculate life expectancy…
From this X thread: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1963801864090128503
and an interesting longer term look at the trend:
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The 7.2% private insurance rate for Switzerland seems wrong : All health insurance in Switzerland is private, but there is a mandate to purchase Basic Healthcare insurance and insurance companies must charge everyone age 26 or older the same rate (so older Swiss are being subsidized by younger Swiss), though poor people get a Government subsidy to buy insurance. Also there are choices of different levels of annual deductible which change the premium rate. There are also optional supplement policies to cover deductibles, copays and healthcare not covered by the standardized Basic Healthcare Plan. Insurance companies are limited in the amount of profit on their basic plans but there is no limit on how much they can charge for supplement policies. Perhaps they only count the optional supplement policies under the 7.2% private insurance ? Healthcare in Switzerland
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It’s OECD data so highly unlikely to be wrong. And yet you’re right. The 2019 OECD data, shows Switzerland at 47.7% (higher than the US): https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2022/03/private-health-insurance-spending_936ad24d/4985356e-en.pdf
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What is really shocking is how much medical care is NOT covered by insurance, even in countries with mandatory private insurance like Switzerland : Perhaps people are selecting the highest possible deductible to reduce the cost of insurance AND not buying the optional supplement policy.
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Gen Z Is Bucking a Terrible Mortality Trend
As millennials enter middle age, their mortality rates remain elevated. Things are looking better for the younger generation.
but…
Full story: Gen Z Is Bucking a Terrible Mortality Trend (Bloomberg)
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What’s the rationale for the increased mortality rate in young N. Americans? Opioids? Guns? Not getting vaccinated?
Canada is also negatively impacted so probably not guns. Is there an opioid crisis in Canada as well?
It appears to be suicide as that’s the one trending upwards. That really sucks. Based on the root causes, under or unemployment and weak social ties, I think this problem may persist and get worse. Poor kids.
The main causes of death for 25- to 34-year-olds in North America are unintentional injuries (including drug overdoses and motor vehicle accidents), suicide, and homicide. While heart disease and cancer become more prevalent, injuries, violence, and poisoning are the primary mortality factors in this age group.
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This is obviously a sign of accelerated aging. I think it is possible because of the multigenerational nature of the mtDNA germline that reductions in the fertilisation average volgate of ΔΨm are behind this. If that is the case then action is needed for younger people within the context of maintaining ΔΨm as after 50 will be late. (not necessarily too late).
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The suicide rate has slowly increased (though it looks like it’s declined slightly in the last few years), but the big rocks are accidents including (I’m guessing ‘mostly’ or ‘of plurality’) overdose and “all other.”
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Chronic Disease Deaths Have Fallen Globally, but Progress in U.S. Stalled
The chance of dying from chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancer and diabetesdeclined in four out of five countries between 2010 and 2019, finds a study of 185 countries published in The Lancet today1.
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death globally. The United Nations has set the goal of reducing deaths from these diseases by one-third by 2030.
The latest study is the first to investigate the change in NCD mortality across countries. It finds that, from 2010 to 2019, the probability of dying from an NCD before the age of 80 fell in 152 countries for women and in 147 countries for men.
Despite these gains, more than half of the countries saw slower declines in the 2010s compared with the previous decade. “Around the beginning of the millennium, we saw significantly lowered mortality rates, but despite political attention suddenly over the last decade, things are not doing as well as before,” says Majid Ezzati, a co-author and global-health researcher at Imperial College London.
In 2019, women in Japan and men in Singapore had the lowest risk of dying from a NCD among the countries studied, while women in Afghanistan and men in Eswatini had the highest (see ‘Risk of dying from chronic disease’).
All 25 high-income countries in the data set saw declines in NCD mortality between 2010 and 2019, with Denmark recording the largest drop for both sexes and the United States the smallest (see ‘Most and least improved’). China, Egypt, Nigeria, Russia and Brazil had a reduction in chronic-disease deaths, whereas India and Papua New Guinea experienced an increase in NCD deaths over the same period.
The full story: Your risk of dying from chronic disease has dropped — if you live in these countries (Nature)
Source paper:
Benchmarking progress in non-communicable diseases: a global analysis of cause-specific mortality from 2001 to 2019
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01388-1/fulltext
U.S. Now Trails Peer Countries for Reducing Deaths From Chronic Diseases
— South Korea, Denmark, Colombia lead global progress from 2010 to 2019
https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth/117397
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I must have a warped sense of reality, because I think that dying in your 80s is too young. 90s is about right and 100 is a good old age.
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Nah… most of my immediate forebearers lived to mid 90s to 100 with no significant exercise, no longevity focus at all, and minimal higher education (but admittedly a great natural diet, and minimal excess fat). I’m really hoping we can push things much further… 110 or 120 in good health seems possible, with some minimal improvements in longevity therapeutics. (and yes, that means I hope we can be having these discussions here for at least the next 5 decades 
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Although to be fair, the conventional wisdom is that there’s a massive drop in vitalty, capability and health every five years starting at 75, then 80, then 85. And deaths start accelerating at each of those points. Before 75, pretty much everyone would say “died so young”, after 75, it still feels possibly, maybe, perhaps premature, but 80+, and most people wouldn’t exclaim “how tragically young!”.
Standards change, of course, but just looking at people, 80+ looks “biologically old”. Have you ever seen the pictures of people who experienced massive irradiation, like after an industrial nuclear accident or the like? You have people on their 30’s and 40’s look like faded photographs as if they lost their stuffing and their skin collapsed from the massive radiation exposure, like extremely accelerated tissue destruction. That’s what “old” looks like. A friend of mine used to keep ball pythons as pets, and he’d feed them live rats. He’d get the rats and drop them into the snake enclosure. It was a bizarre and mesmerizing process. The rats were of different ages, and the old ones would move slowly and clumsily, their fur sparse, matted and lacking in color, bones visible under the skin. I thought they looked just like old people, not long for this world; when the snake struck, they’d barely put up a fight, whereas the young rats would freak and struggle. Old people in hospitals, just fading away, young cancer patients struggling full of fear, hope and rage.
I’m a rat closing in on 70. It’s the last moments when I might make a heroic, desperate leap to get out of the cage as the snake coils nearby. I’m popping pills and living all out, but I can hear the blade whooshing through the air as the scythe swung by Death aims for my neck. 80 is not that far away, y’all - time is up in the blink of an eye.
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Yep. This is one thing I really keep in mind when raising my own kids. Stranger danger, wearing seatbelts etc is all very important - but the biggest threat to their lives is actually their own mental health. And it’s also the thing where we just don’t have a good idea how to prevent it. Scary indeed.
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Spain is 84 and Portugal is 82.7. The countries lifestyles are pretty similar but Spain has higher GDP, higher level of education, higher level of preventive care, less smoking among young ppl. Spain is just a bit better to earn that 1 extra year of life. It shows that even small changes in the right direction will result in longer lifespan.
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