- More than 20.5 million years of life may have been lost globally due to COVID-19, a new study has found.
- To calculate the years of life lost, the researchers compared the ages of people who died of COVID-19 with their average life expectancy.
- People over 75 represent a quarter of the years of life lost in the pandemic, the study concluded. Men lost more years than women.
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Overall, an average person is expected to live to be 73 years old. But the pandemic has reduced more than 1 million lives, according to a new study.
The researchers compared people’s ages when they died of COVID-19 with their average life expectancy. When a person died prematurely, the discrepancy between the two was considered years of life lost to the pandemic.
The findings, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, show that more than 20.5 million years of life in total may have been lost globally due to COVID-19. On average, each person who died of coronavirus lost 16 years of life.
Almost 45% of the lost years occurred among people between 55 and 75 years old. People over 75 accounted for 25% of the years lost, although this group has seen the majority of deaths. Children under 55 represent about 30% of the years lost.
The data, the researchers wrote, should lead to “greater awareness” that public health policies during the pandemic should protect young people as well. The researchers also suggested that countries should pay more attention to reducing the number of deaths among men, who are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than women.
Men lost 44% more years than women
A man reads the newspaper in Lisbon, Portugal, on May 20, 2020.
Horacio Villalobos / Corbis / Getty Images
The researchers behind the new study – from Finland, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States – analyzed data on more than 1.3 million people who died of COVID-19 in 81 countries as of 6 January. Only about 274,000 people in this cohort reached their full life expectancy before dying from the disease.
Men were more affected than women: the study found that men lost 44% more years of life than women due to premature deaths from COVID-19. On average, men in the study lived to be 71, compared with 76 for women.
A December study found that men are almost three times more likely to need intensive treatment for COVID-19 than women, and 1.4 times more likely to die from the disease.
Scientists are not yet sure why. Some research suggests that women develop a stronger T-cell response to the coronavirus, which helps their immune system to identify and destroy the pathogen. But in some countries, men also smoke more cigarettes than women and have higher rates of pre-existing health problems, which can make them vulnerable to more serious outcomes.
But the proportion of lives lost between men and women was not the same in all countries. Men in low-income countries like Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Peru lost far more years than women, while high-income countries like Finland and Canada had relatively similar numbers between the sexes.
A doctor checks the vital signs of an ICU patient at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, California, on January 3, 2021.
Apu Gomes / AFP via Getty Images
This may be simply because high-income countries generally have more robust treatment resources, but it is also possible that female deaths are less likely to be recorded or attributed directly to COVID-19 in low-income countries. In some places, women do not have access to transportation to reach the hospital or cannot leave their families for medical care.
In general, more lives were also lost among younger groups in low and middle income countries.
Previous studies have attributed this pattern to a higher level of residential agglomeration in low-income cities or to a higher incidence of pre-existing diseases among non-elderly populations in developing countries. Another factor may be that young people in these countries are more often forced to work in jobs with a high risk of exposure to coronavirus.
More years lost than seasonal flu
People wait in line to receive free coronavirus tests in Silver Spring, Maryland, on November 18, 2020.
Toni L. Sandys / The Washington Post by Getty Images
It is now well known that the coronavirus is far more deadly than the flu: it killed more than 2.4 million people worldwide in 13 months. Respiratory diseases caused by seasonal flu, in turn, kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year.
But the new study also determined that the coronavirus cut an enormous number of years from global life expectancy.
In highly developed countries that have been heavily impacted by the pandemic, research has shown that the number of years of life lost due to COVID-19 can be two to nine times greater than that due to seasonal flu.
Of course, coronavirus transmission continues worldwide, and some countries have not finished collecting data on COVID-19 deaths in late 2020. Therefore, the total number of years lost due to COVID-19, wrote the authors of study, could “increase substantially in the coming months.”