Would most Covid-19 victims have died soon, without the virus?

Dirk Husmeier (University of Glasgow)

Friday 15th May, 2020 14:30-15:00 Zoom link in description

Abstract

Meeting ID: 932 5284 6336
Password: 987211
 
"Sacrifice the weak" urged a sign at a protest against Tennessee's lockdown on April20th, though whether the person holding it was trolling the other protesters is unknown. Some claim social distancing is pointless, since Covid-19's elderly and multimorbid victims would soon have have died of other causes. In Britain many pundits have said that two-thirds of the country's dead were already within a year of passing away. Can we test this contentious claim?
 
In my talk, I will present a statistical approach to estimate how ill Covid-19's victims were before catching it, how long they might have lived otherwise, and how that can be quantified objectively with "years of life lost". The method is based on a combination of data integration, data augmentation, Markov chain Monte Carlo and survival analysis. 
 
This work is part of a collaborative project with Peter Hanlon, Fergus Chadwick, Anoop Shah, Rachael Wood, Jon Minton, Gerry McCartney, Colin Fischbacher, Frances S. Mair, Jason Matthiopoulos, and David A. McAllister.

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