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More Than 28 Million Years of Life Lost to Covid
New calculations illustrate the magnitude of lives cut short
Just as Covid-19 deaths exceed 750,000 in the United States and the global tally crosses the 5 million mark, a new study looks at the global loss of life from a different perspective: Years lost because people died sooner than they otherwise would have.
By only a partial tally, lives cut short by Covid-19 during 2020 add up to 28 million lost years across the 37 countries that were analyzed, scientists report in the journal BMJ.
The tally does not include Covid deaths during 2021, and it excluded deaths in most of Asia, Africa and Latin America due to lack of consistent data, the researchers say. The calculation involved comparing the age at which people died to their normal life expectancies, factoring in not just recorded Covid deaths but the excess deaths that occurred compared to relatively stable norms. In other words, the tally is not inflated by any conspiracy-theory notions that Covid deaths aren’t real or are overcounted.
The countries with the highest number of lost years were Russia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and the United States, in that order.
Conversely, the situation improved or stayed the same in Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan and…
