- More than 20.5 million years of life may have been lost worldwide due to COVID-19, a new study has found.
- To calculate life years, researchers compared the ages of people who died from COVID-19 with their average life expectancy.
- The study found that people over 75 represent a quarter of the life years lost to the pandemic. Men have lost more years than women.
- Visit the Insider Business Department for more stories.
Worldwide, the average person is expected to live to the age of 73. But the pandemic has crippled more than 1 million lives, according to a new study.
The researchers compared the ages of people when they died of COVID-19 with their average life expectancy. When someone dies prematurely, the difference between the two is considered life years that the pandemic lost.
The findings, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, show that more than 20.5 million years of total life could have been lost worldwide due to COVID-19. On average, every person who died from the coronavirus lost 16 years.
Nearly 45% of the lost years were among people aged 55 to 75 years. People older than 75 were 25% of the lost years, although the group saw the majority of deaths. Those younger than 55 represent about 30% of the lost years.
The data, the researchers write, should ‘raise awareness’ of the fact that public health policy should also protect young people during the pandemic. The researchers also suggested that countries pay more attention to reducing the death toll among men, which is stronger against COVID-19 than women.
Men lost 44% more years than women
A man reads the newspaper on May 20, 2020 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos / Corbis / Getty Images
The researchers behind the new study – which comes from Finland, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the USA – looked at data for more than 1.3 million people who died from COVID-19 in 81 countries by 6 January. Only about 274,000 people in that group reached their full life expectancy before dying of the disease.
Men are hit harder than women: The study found that men lost 44% more life years than women due to premature COVID-19 deaths. On average, men in the study turned 71 years old, compared with 76 for women.
A December study found that men were nearly three times more likely to require intensive treatment for COVID-19 than women, and 1.4 times more likely to die from the disease.
Scientists still do not know why. Some research suggests that women develop a stronger T cell response to the coronavirus, which helps their immune systems identify and destroy the pathogen. But in some countries, men also smoke more cigarettes than women do, and they have a higher number of existing health conditions, which can make them vulnerable to worse outcomes.
But the relationship between men and women who were lost was not the same for every country. Men in low-income countries such as Cuba, Dominican Republic and Peru lost many more years than women, while high-income countries such as Finland and Canada had a relatively similar number between the sexes.
On January 3, 2021, a physician examines the vital signs of an ICU patient at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, California.
Apu Gomes / AFP via Getty Images
This may be simply because high-income countries often have more robust treatment resources, but it is also possible that female deaths are less registered or directly attributed to COVID-19 in low-income countries. In some places, women do not have access to transportation to go to a hospital, or they cannot leave their families to receive medical care.
In general, more lives were lost among younger groups in low- and middle-income countries.
Previous studies have attributed this pattern to a greater number of low-income city dwellers, or to a higher prevalence of existing conditions among non-elderly populations in developing countries. Another factor may be that young people in these countries are more often forced to work with a high risk of coronavirus exposure.
More years lost than the seasonal flu
People are waiting in line to receive free coronavirus tests in Silver Spring, Maryland, on November 18, 2020.
Toni L. Sandys / The Washington Post via Getty Images
It is now well understood that the coronavirus is far more deadly than the flu: it has killed more than 2.4 million people worldwide in 13 months. Seasonal flu-causing respiratory illnesses meanwhile kill between 290 and 650,000 people a year.
But the new study also found that the coronavirus shaved off an excessive number of years of global life.
In the highly developed countries affected by the pandemic, research has shown that the number of life years lost due to COVID-19 can be two to nine times higher due to seasonal flu.
Of course, coronavirus transmission continues around the world, and some countries have not yet finished collecting data on COVID-19 deaths as of the end of 2020. The total number of years lost due to COVID-19, according to the authors of the study ‘therefore increase significantly in the next few months. “