A new study released on Thursday is one of the first to try to measure deaths during the pandemic that were caused not by the virus itself, but by the economic devastation it has unleashed. The study estimates that the rise in unemployment seen last spring helped to cause an additional 30,000 deaths among working-age adults in the U.S. last year.
Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) analyzed several data sources to arrive at their numbers, including data collected by the government on unemployment and mortality reported in 2020. Last year, it saw the highest reported monthly unemployment rate – 14, 7% in April 2020 – seen since the Great Depression. They then mapped this data to earlier estimates of how much a sudden increase in unemployment can contribute to the excess of deaths that would not have happened otherwise.
By their calculations, the spring decline in jobs linked to the pandemic will lead to an excessive death toll of 30,231 Americans aged 25 to 64 from April 2020 to March 2021.
The team’s findings, Published in the American Journal of Public Health, carry some uncertainty. Using different assumptions about the risk of increased unemployment deaths or based on different measures of unemployment (some measures include people who are able to work but are not currently looking for work as unemployed, for example, while others are not) changed their math . Therefore, in different scenarios, unemployment-related deaths related to the pandemic ranged from 8,315 to 201,968.
Since the study’s findings are based only on modeling the expected number of deaths, it cannot show us exactly what may have caused those deaths. But it is known that job loss contributes to worsening physical and mental health, often because people also end up losing health insurance. The role of a presumptive factor – suicide – is less clear. Some initial evidence suggested that suicides are unlikely to have increased significantly in the U.S. last year. Still other data have shown that other health problems possibly related to spikes in unemployment, such as drug overdoses, became more prevalent.
G / O Media can receive a commission
What is clear is that the impact of these excess deaths, very similar to those directly attributed to viral disease, has not been shared equally among the different racial and socioeconomic groups of Americans. According to the study, somewhere around 72% of these excess deaths involved Americans without a college degree, although this group represents only 37% of Americans of working age in general. In his analysis, black Americans, men and people over 45 also had a disproportionate chance of dying.
It is difficult to separate the indirect effects of a natural disaster, especially one that has lasted since the covid-19 pandemic lasted. Some people have argued that aggressive measures to contain the pandemic, which sometimes included closing companies like bars and restaurants, have been counterproductive, in part because of the fall in potentially lost jobs. However, some countries, including New Zealand, have been able to completely prevent the spread of the pandemic within their borders through these measures, allowed to recover from their recessions.
In any case, the USA did not do a good job of preventing the pandemic, with almost half a million deaths directly attributed to covid-19, or in keeping Americans in financial distress on a solid footing. It is likely that some of these the deaths could have been prevented simply by better policy – a lesson the authors hope we can learn in the second year of covid-19.
“A number of different programs and policies can help prevent unemployment-related deaths and their disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities,” lead author Ellicott Matthay, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Health and Community at Gizmodo, told E-mail. UCSF. “Some of the most prominent include: (1) more generous and extended unemployment benefits with broader eligibility criteria, (2) programs to promote rapid reemployment after job loss and (3) expanded access to health and mental health insurance / substances use the services, especially for those who have been hardest hit. “
This article was updated with comments from the study’s lead author.