Lots of people have asked the question: why is COVID-19 more fatal in one place than another?
Our paper largely answers this question - it is mostly explained by age! medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
For example, in the US:
Utah has the lowest IFR in the country, with our estimate putting it at exactly 0.5%
Indiana has a much higher IFR, at roughly 1.1%
But this is LARGELY explained by differences in the age breakdown of infections - in Utah ~50% of all infections were in people <45yo when we ran our analysis compared to 40% in Indiana
This might seem like a small difference, but even relatively minor changes in the age breakdown of infections can have an outsized impact
This does not mean that no other explanations are possible, but correcting for age explains 90% of the difference between IFR in different areas, which is pretty significant!
Also worth noting - given that there are very few longitudinal samples, we cannot exclude the possibility that other things are impacting IFR more recently (i.e. better treatments)
One interesting consequence of the exponential gradient is that you can't divide people into "old" and "young" easily!
There's no easy delineation between 'low' and 'high' risk, it's a spectrum
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