Under-45 coronavirus deaths are miniscule but the young are bearing the economic brunt

In lost work and ruined social lives, younger people have been hit hard by the impact of Covid-19 and the draconian lockdown.

And now the data confirms that those aged below their mid-40s are extremely unlikely to die from the disease. But still they continue to be controlled and restricted on the same terms as the elderly who are at high risk.

Even the vaguest suggestion, floated of late in the media by ministers, that measures might be introduced to give the young a little more leeway are denounced as ageism. Yet week after week, the damage being done to the economic prospects of Britain’s young deepens.

The difficult reality is that nearly 90% of the deaths recorded in England and Wales until mid-July occurred among those over 65 years old. Even within that cohort, the distribution tilts exponentially toward the very old. Data for June shows that the mortality rate among those over 90 was nearly as high as that for every other age group put together.

It’s important to note that the increase in mortality rates, measured as deaths per 100,000 people, rises exponentially with age. The death rate for the 65-69 cohort is 53 deaths per 100,000 – just 7% of the mortality rate for those twenty years older.

That leaves the age-specific mortality rate from coronavirus for those under 65 at a vanishingly small 4 per 100,000. Britons under the age of 50 are seven times more likely to die from cancer than from coronavirus. Yet the catastrophic cost of lockdown for the young and middle-aged continues.

There comes a point when the statistics get so small that they lose their capacity to represent anything meaningful. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) seems to have decided that this is the case for mortality rates among the under-45s. The ONS uses a single age category spanning between the ages of 15 and 44. This shows 551 deaths in that group since the beginning of the pandemic. Including the handful of infant cases, that bring the mortality count for those under 45 to 557. That’s 0.01% of total deaths.

Every individual death is a tragedy for the family involved. But many of those who lost their lives had existing, serious conditions or vulnerabilities. At the end of this crisis, the number of deaths of those healthy and under 45 will be miniscule relative to the population and the wider Covid-19 death toll among the elderly.

Again, we continue to apply the same restrictions to the young.

What should be obvious by now to policymakers is that the oldest are disproportionately at risk. Older Britons seem to have got the message and are taking evasive action themselves. Surveys conducted by the ONS suggest that those over 65 are sensibly adopting social distancing and face coverings at a much greater rate than the young, who are now being blamed for continuing to circulate the virus. From the perspective of the most vulnerable, lockdown has been a necessary and laudable measure.

But those with the most to lose economically and professionally from lockdown – the under 30s – are also those with the least to lose from coronavirus. Young people work disproportionately in those sectors – retail, food and drink, entertainment – hit by job cuts. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has also suggested that graduates entering the job market now will face lower earnings for years to come.

In that context, the ONS figures published in the last month obscure difficult truths. They blur the distribution of mortality between the ages of 15 and 44. Why teenagers have been classified alongside those in their forties is unclear. An ONS spokesperson suggested that it may involve disclosure issues associated with small sample sizes. That in itself should be enough to reveal the vanishingly small scale we’re dealing with.