The Upside-Down Covid Death Toll is Due to Confounding by Age

Settling a long-standing puzzle

As the pandemic got going, most informed observers, including the present author, expected that the poor nations of the world would face the brunt of it. As I wrote back in March 2020:

The one thing we can be sure about is that the brunt of the pandemic will be borne by the poor nations of the world. During the 1918 pandemic, half the fatalities were in …