The COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted in an astonishing 20 million years of life lost worldwide, according to estimates in a new study. On average, each person who died lost 16 years of life.
The study’s researchers – from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany – analyzed data from more than 1.2 million people in 81 countries who died of COVID-19 to now. (The researchers used information from a database of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and deaths known as COVerAge-DB, which includes data from 112 countries. The analysis included all countries with at least one COVID-19 death on January 6, 2021.) Then, they calculated “lost years of life”, or the difference between a person’s age at death and their Life expectancyusing data on life expectancy in these countries.
Overall, more than 20.5 million years of life were lost due to COVID-19 in those countries alone.
“From a public health standpoint, years of life lost are crucial because it assesses how much life has been interrupted for populations affected by the disease,” wrote the authors in their article, published Thursday (February 18) in the newspaper Scientific Reports.
Related: Life expectancy in the US drops dramatically due to COVID-19
Only a quarter of those lost years of life came from people over 75. Almost half of the years of life were lost by people aged 55 to 75, and almost a third came from people under 55. were available, the years of life lost were 44% higher in men than in women, the authors said.
The study also found that in countries with many cases of COVID-19, the years of life lost due to COVID-19 were two to nine times greater than the years of life lost due to the flu during a typical flu season.
The researchers note that their study had some important limitations. Given that many countries are likely to underestimate deaths from COVID-19, researchers’ calculation of total years of life lost may be underestimated. On the other hand, people who die from COVID-19 may tend to have a shorter life expectancy than the average person, which can lead to an overestimation of the years of life lost. The study also did not analyze the years of life lost in all 195 countries of the world, which means that the global number of victims may be even greater.
Finally, the study looked only at premature death and did not assess the potential health impact of the disease among survivors, or “years lived with disabilities” as a result of the disease. More research is needed on the long-term health effects of COVID-19 and the frequency with which they occur, they said.
Originally published on Live Science.