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by taneq 2524 days ago
> people (usually already frail)

This always makes these sort of dire predictions sound exaggerated to me. There’s always a population of (usually older) people who are nearing the end and we seem irrationally unwilling to accept “old age” as a cause of death. Any slight disturbance is then blamed and we get dramatic headlines about “hundreds die in 35C heatwave.”

1 comments

Infants and toddlers are also frail, and regularly die from heatstroke. The probability of this happening increases as temperatures rise.
True, although not to the same degree as seniors by far. I'm struggling to find much data, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950160/ claims +55% male infant mortality rate in Paris and +12% in the rest of the country (females were unaffected, which I guess ties in with male infants generally being more fragile than females) during the 2003 heat wave in France. They don't give baseline rates, though, so it's hard to tell what this means in real numbers.