That’s exactly what I meant by “we hear about increased risk if …”. Those figures don’t do much to distinguish between e.g. “these specific conditions make it more likely to be bad, and if you’re old but don’t have them then you’re fine” and “age makes it more likely to be bad, and if you’re young but have those conditions then you’re fine”.
Do they do anything to distinguish those possibilities? Probably. How much depends on how strongly those various conditions correlate with age. But my feeling is that e.g. cardiovascular disease is a better indication of being old than hypertension or diabetes, which I think are more likely to crop up in middle age, so the percentages feel fairly compatible with the it’s-just-age hypothesis. If it were 6% for CVD and 10% for hypertension instead then I’d be more confident that there’s something specifically bad about hypertension that makes COVID-19 worse.
(If I have to guess, I guess that the answer is somewhere in the middle: almost any specific health issue makes something like COVID-19 more likely to kill you, including the specific ones listed there but others too, and being older is bad because of all the ways you’re likely to be less healthy if older. But who knows?)
Yes, you are stuck with predicting based on the two different models (or, as you say, something in between). For a given individual, if you use your credence in the models you can get your best guess as to the CFR via weighted average.
This has larger uncertainty than a proper analysis but until we have one it’s probably the best we can do.
That’s exactly what I meant by “we hear about increased risk if …”. Those figures don’t do much to distinguish between e.g. “these specific conditions make it more likely to be bad, and if you’re old but don’t have them then you’re fine” and “age makes it more likely to be bad, and if you’re young but have those conditions then you’re fine”.
Do they do anything to distinguish those possibilities? Probably. How much depends on how strongly those various conditions correlate with age. But my feeling is that e.g. cardiovascular disease is a better indication of being old than hypertension or diabetes, which I think are more likely to crop up in middle age, so the percentages feel fairly compatible with the it’s-just-age hypothesis. If it were 6% for CVD and 10% for hypertension instead then I’d be more confident that there’s something specifically bad about hypertension that makes COVID-19 worse.
(If I have to guess, I guess that the answer is somewhere in the middle: almost any specific health issue makes something like COVID-19 more likely to kill you, including the specific ones listed there but others too, and being older is bad because of all the ways you’re likely to be less healthy if older. But who knows?)
Yes, you are stuck with predicting based on the two different models (or, as you say, something in between). For a given individual, if you use your credence in the models you can get your best guess as to the CFR via weighted average.
This has larger uncertainty than a proper analysis but until we have one it’s probably the best we can do.