Héctor Pifarré i Arolas, Enrique Acosta, Guillem López-Casasnovas
Adeline Lo, Catia Nicodemo, Tim Riffe, Mikko Myrskylä
2021 · Scientific Reports
Abstract Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 81 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. We find that over 20.5 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 globally. As of January 6, 2021, YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza; three quarters of the YLL result from deaths in ages below 75 and almost a third from deaths below 55; and men have lost 45% more life years than women. The results confirm the large mortality impact of COVID-19 among the elderly. They also call for heightened awareness in devising policies that protect vulnerable demographics losing the largest number of life-years.
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Let's look at years of life lost, then, shall we? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3 > YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza And that is after all the societal changes to deal with the disease. I personally think that YLL of 2-9x the flu after mitigations clearly justified the mitigations.
COVID-19 is a serious public health problem but let's not exaggerate. In terms of years of life lost it's about 2-9x worse than the flu, not 20x. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3 The average age of COVID-19 deaths in developed countries is about 80. Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments have greatly reduced the risk of death. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-age-penalty-115920032...
There have been a number of studies (e.g. [1], [2], [3]) published estimating how many years of life have been lost to COVID-19. The estimates vary between ~10-15 average years lost per COVID death. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3 [2] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201021/More-than-25-mill... [3] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200923124557.h...
Very back of hand numbers, but, assuming this article is true (haven't looked into it) 900,000 death * 15 yll/death [0] = 13.5 million YLL vs ~63 million YLL for Spanish Flu and 0.5 million YLL for typical flu season [1] [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3 [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843747/
> The average years of life lost per death is 16 years. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3 And, dismissing the death of someone by saying "they were going to die soon anyway, so what" is disgusting.
>poverty and depression So you support NZ's style "zero covid" policy? Because that beats the economic consequences of letting COVID run loose. >"death's door" => an average of 16 years of life. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3
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