How long did you even wanna live anyway?

I was listening to this video,

COVID decreased life expectancy by 2 years. What does that mean? by Sabine Hossfelder (YouTube)

Sabine said that the standard measure of life expectancy “is easy to misunderstand”. So, instead of expecting that people should make an effort to understand it, we dumb it down instead, making it easier to understand, but much less accurate. That is, people will get a less-accurate impression, but be just as confident in it. It will become the new reality, as usual.

Hossfelder talks about the Period life expectancy, which is a measure that assumes that every year going forward will be like the one being measured (2020 in this case). She says that “no-one believes that this will happen”, so that the measure—though official and standard—also doesn’t impart useful information, necessarily. However, 2021 was worse than 2020 in the U.S., despite vaccines. And 2022 is shaping up to be an absolutely horrible year in the U.S., as far a COVID-deaths-per-year goes. Maybe the number is more accurate than she thinks?

Why do we use the number anyway? Because “it’s the best number we can come up with from the existing data”. There are other numbers—e.g. the cohort life expectancy—would be more accurate, but would only be useful after people are already dead. It’s a useful number as an input to other formulae, but it’s not predictive.

She also says that “[t]he life expectancy at a given age increases with age.” A rule of thumb for right now is to take your life expectancy at birth and add about eight years. Using the U.S. actuarial tables, my life expectancy is 68.3 + 8 years, which takes me to 76.3 years, which seems … low?

That’s for the U.S., though, a country in which I’ve not lived for almost 20 years. That’s why she suggests to look at a Life Period Table instead. That table tells me how many years I have left to live, which, added to my current age, would give me a life expectancy of 79.75 years instead. I can’t find the “Life Period Table” for Switzerland, but I’m sure it would predict slightly higher.