For what it's worth I did not mean to imply a relationship between the average median life expectancy for the population as a whole and the life expediency of a person who's reached that age.
As you point out doing so would be a statistical fallacy. E.g. someone who's reached the age of 5 has already made it "past" infant mortality, and therefore has a higher life expectancy than a newborn.
I was using it as a shorthand to reference how lopsided the age distribution of COVID-19 deaths is. We can quibble over whether an 80 year old who's died from it would have lived an extra 0, 1, 5, 10 years.
But even if you were to completely misunderstand how life expectancy works, you'd be a lot more accurate than the GP's reference to a 747 crashing into a mountain, since that example implies deaths from a random sample of the population. Now instead of being off by 5-10 years you're off by many decades.
For what it's worth I did not mean to imply a relationship between the average median life expectancy for the population as a whole and the life expediency of a person who's reached that age.
As you point out doing so would be a statistical fallacy. E.g. someone who's reached the age of 5 has already made it "past" infant mortality, and therefore has a higher life expectancy than a newborn.
I was using it as a shorthand to reference how lopsided the age distribution of COVID-19 deaths is. We can quibble over whether an 80 year old who's died from it would have lived an extra 0, 1, 5, 10 years.
But even if you were to completely misunderstand how life expectancy works, you'd be a lot more accurate than the GP's reference to a 747 crashing into a mountain, since that example implies deaths from a random sample of the population. Now instead of being off by 5-10 years you're off by many decades.