A statistical minefield

From time to time, I hear people explaining how COVID doesn't really matter because nearly all the people who actually die of it are either very old or very ill anyway. Or both. Sometimes I am moved to respond statistically, that is to say that statisticians have got it all under control.

One approach is that of excess deaths, open to anywhere with a reasonable standard of death registration. Rather more sophisticated, and rather more contentious, is to work into the presentation of the data the quality of life and the life expectancy at age of death in an attempt to quantify the damage. There is an assumption here that loss, for example, of two years of life on dialysis or in severe depression counts for less than loss of twenty healthy and active years of life. A bit harsh, but not an unreasonable aid to the distribution of scarce health resources.

Then this morning, continuing my read of reference 2, I come across DALY, otherwise disability adjusted life years and it is clear from Wikipedia at reference 3 that lots of people have been working on how best to do this. We are offered the map and legend included above.

Which suggest that a lot more good life years are lost in sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan than in most other places. With Russia being about on a par with India.

But I an not satisfied with this: I want to see how the sums have been done, to see the source, said to be reference 1. Eventually I work my work through to reference 4, but the nearest to the map included in Wikipedia that I could find is the one included above, which does HALE rather than DALY. The same general idea, but not the same at all. The most one can say is that they both start with the same map of the world; the same projection.

Rather to my surprise, despite their huge spend on health, the US doesn't do very well, at least not on this showing.

And I have not run down a proper statistical description of either map. Perhaps I will have another go tomorrow.

References

Reference 1: WHO disease and injury country estimates - World Health Organization - 2009. 

Reference 2: A cure for darkness: the story of depression and how we treat it – Alex Riley – 2021. The prompt for this post.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year.

Reference 4: https://www.who.int/data/gho/map-gallery.