COVID-19 Co-Morbidities, the Old, and Nursing Homes

The stupid ideas that COVID-19 mostly kills the old and/or members of minorities are still hanging around.

These are stupid ideas because they come from doing this. First, create two bins. Say, those over 65 and those under 65. Second, assign each death to a bin. Third, conclude from the fact that “old” bin has more in it if you’re young you don’t have much to worry about.†

If Jordan Peterson has contributed anything long-lasting to the thinking of many laypeople, I sure hope it’s the idea that if you’re doing social science with just one variable, you’re being pretty dumb. That’s OK as a textbook exercise, or as an undergraduate paper. But the real world is multivariate, and journalists should only talk about the results of multivariate studies.

With disease, those other variables we should look at are called co-morbidities. We are already certain about a few of these: having high blood pressure, or being obese, makes it more likely that you’ll die of COVID-19.

The thing is, most old people have more than one co-morbidity. The question then is, after you account for all the other co-morbidities, does being old still make you more likely to die?

The jury is still out on that one, although most are leaning towards it making a difference.

But there’s clearly another co-morbidity that we need to make sure we include: living in a nursing home or other group home. It should be clear to everyone by now that our policies towards nursing homes are a big part of the problem. For example, in both Washington and New Jersey, nursing home operators were able to hide either sick or dead patients in their care. Further, in New York, it turns out that hospitals were required by policy to discharge patients who tested positive back to nursing homes to infect more people.

Anyway, there’s a lot going on here, and I’m still not convinced that being old is a big part of the problem with COVID-19.

† The story with minorities is much the same, although the bin with African-Americans in it will be smaller. So they add a fourth step: divide the size of each bin by the size of the population it’s drawn from. It’s a fair question to ask if minorities have more co-morbidities, and a problem if they do. But just saying that African-Americans are more at risk, and implying that this is because there’s something wrong with society, is both stupid thinking, but also probably wrong.