Calculations

The data for www.DeathRiskRankings.org are publicly available and easily accessible. The European mortality data are available from Eurostat and the U.S. data are available from CDC Wonder. Our data are based on the averages from 2001 to 2007.

Several calculations were required in order to merge the Eurostat and the CDC data sets. Additional calculations were done in order to allow you to forecast a death based on a given age, and to provide averages for populations. In some cases, we sacrificed specificity and functionality in order to facilitate U.S. and European comparisons. For more information about when the data was obtained and how it was transformed, see underlying data.

The U.S. data is broken down by race (white, black, and other), whereas the European data is not. It is possible to compare US groups by race with groups in European countries.

The forecasts for beyond one year are calculated using a “survival” function. For example, the forecast for a 40-year old male in the US to live another five years is 14,554 MicroMorts (i.e, about a 1.5% chance of dying within the forecast period). The calculation uses MicroMorts for each of the successive five years,. The number of MicroMorts for a 40-year old is 2,497, meaning that for each 1,000,000 40-year olds, on average 1,000,000 – 2,497 = 999,997,503 survive. The number of MicroMorts for the second year is 2,706, so the number of people expected to survive for two years is 999,997, 503 x (1,000,000 – 2,706) / 1,000,000. Using the MicroMorts from the table, we can see that the five-year forecast is calculated as

  { 1 - [ (1,000,000 – 2,497)
      x ((1,000,000 – 2,706)/1,000,000)
         x ((1,000,000 – 2,920)/1,000,000)
                  x ((1,000,000 – 3,143)/1,000,000)
                        x((1,000,000 – 3,371)/1,000,000) ] }
                                                              x 1,000,000
                                                                       = 14,552

Age MicroMorts
40 2,497
41 2,706
42 2,920
43 3,143
44 3,371