The NYT is running obituaries of celebrities who have died of coronavirus, with 28 so far. The average age thus far has been 66, which seems somewhat younger than the average age of NYT obituaries for other other causes. For comparison, I took the average of the first 28 obituaries I found for March 2019 and they averaged 82, or 16 years longer.
Obviously, these are small sample sizes so far, and there is selection bias of various kinds involved. But as this sample of NYT obituaries grows in coming days, some patterns might start to emerge since NYT obituaries offer a fair amount of information about each victim, although what those patterns will be I don’t yet have much of a clue.
I’m a big believer that old prejudices tend to contain a grain of truth, but this is a new phenomenon.
