COVID-19 death rates by age and sex and the resulting mortality vulnerability of countries and regions in the world

The growing number of series on COVID-19 deaths classified by age and sex, released by national health authorities, has allowed us to compute age and sex patterns of its mortality, based on 183,619 deaths from Western Europe and the USA. We highlight the specific age schedule of COVID-19 mortality and its pronounced excess male mortality and we then apply these COVID-19 death rates to world populations, in 2020. Our results underscore that considerable variations exist between world regions, as concerns the potential impact of COVID-19 mortality, because of their demographic structures. When compared to younger countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the vulnerability to COVID-19 mortality is shown to be 17 times higher in several industrialized countries of East Asia and Europe. There is a high correlation (r2= .44) between demographic vulnerability to COVID-19 mortality and current COVID-19 death rates.