Besides population age structure, health and other demographic factors can contribute to understanding the COVID-19 burden.

An insightful paper by Dowd et al. (1) highlights the importance of demography for analyzing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)–related mortality. The authors underscore the role of population age structure and intergenerational contacts for understanding differences in cross-country fatality and estimate the potential impact of the pandemic on different populations, acknowledging the need for additional information on the prevalence of comorbidities. We aim to interpret the proposed scenarios considering the widely different prevalence of chronic conditions by age in three of the countries discussed in the original paper. We argue that the burden of chronic diseases has the potential to offset the possible benefits of younger populations with different epidemiological characteristics.