Thursday, July 13, 2017

At What Age Are Mauritians Dying These Days?

This is different from life expectancy which looks at how long a baby born in a year might expect to live on average. Which by the way was 77.69 years for women and 70.59 years for men back in 2012. So baby girls born 5 years ago should expect to watch 7 EPL seasons more than their male counterparts. And eat an extra 7,775 meals assuming they have their last kari pwason ek farata a few minutes before leaving. The numbers for Rodrigues are better: 78.47 years for women and 73.27 for men. That is baby girls in Rodrigues were expected to live an extra 9 months and baby boys 2.68 years more. The urit will definitely not be leaping for joy. The overall number for our Republic in 2015 was 74.6 years or 9.1 years less than world-beating Japan.

It hasn't always been like that. At least for women. Indeed female life expectancy for the island of Mauritius has been up to two-and-a-half years more than those for our sister island. This was true in 1983. The situation had reversed by 1992 and since 1998 women on the two islands were expected to live within one-and-half years of each other. Life expectancy for men in Rodrigues has been higher by at least two years between 2006 and 2012 even hitting a max of 3 years in 2009. Mauritian men could probably catch up by running at least 5 minutes every day. A Bus Rapid Transit system should make that a lot easier.

To answer the question in the title I looked at the age of the people who passed away in the last three days. The average for the 130 of our citizens who just departed is 68.06 years. The standard deviation is 15.22 years.

1 comment:

Sanjay Jagatsingh said...

Read somewhere that a giant panda spent some of his last moments eating some bamboo. One last time of the good stuff eh?