A study estimates that the number of years of life lost worldwide due to Covid-19 would be 20.5 million. A figure which, although impressive, could be underestimated.
- The researchers estimated premature mortality from Covid-19 by calculating the difference between an individual’s age at death and their life expectancy, and found an average decline of 16 years of life per individual.
- These data are undoubtedly underestimated because it is difficult to accurately record deaths linked to Covid-19 around the world.
20.5 million is the number of years of life lost due to Covid-19, according to researchers from the Barcelona Center for Health and Economics Research and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany. Their work has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. To arrive at this result, the authors estimated the premature mortality due to Covid-19, that is to say the rate of years of life lost, by calculating the difference between the age of an individual at death and its life expectancy. Thus, they were able to compare the years of life lost due to SARS-CoV-2 with those lost for other common diseases, such as influenza or cardiovascular disease.
Sixteen years less life per individual
The researchers also collected data on life expectancy and the total number of deaths from Covid-19 from each country. Thus, they worked on the data of more than 1,279,866 deaths in 81 countries. They reached 20,507,518 years of life lost due to Covid-19 for the entire planet.
The individual average is sixteen years lost, which means that those who died statistically should have lived sixteen years longer than the age at which they died. 44.9% of the cases studied by the researchers involved patients between the ages of 55 and 75. Over 30% were under 55 and 25% over 75. By comparison, the number of years of life lost due to Covid-19 has been two to nine times higher than that for seasonal flu and a quarter to a third higher than that for heart disease. “Our results confirm that the impact on mortality from Covid-19 is significant, not only in terms of the number of deaths, but also in terms of years of life lost.“say the authors of the study.
An assessment that remains provisional
“These results should be interpreted in the context of an ongoing and evolving pandemic, this study is a snapshot of the possible impacts of Covid-19 on years of life lost up to January 6, 2021, explain the authors. Estimates of years of life lost may be underestimated, due to the difficulty of accurately recording deaths related to Covid-19.“ In fact, in 35 of the countries studied, the data available is at most nine months old. And, around the world, policies for recording such deaths are only just beginning to become standardized, which means the data could be misjudged. This is therefore a provisional assessment, since the number of deaths linked to Covid-19 continues to increase.
Since the start of the epidemic, more than 2 million people have died of Covid-19 worldwide.
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