The main direct and indirect effects of covid-19 have led authorities to implement policies that strike a balance between reducing the direct impact of pandemic. and including the long-term damage to society arising from protectionist policies.
One crucial parameter for working out how restriction policies might be entitled to the impact of covid-19 mortality, which has led to large-scale international collaborations to collect data that is ‘registration of deaths due to the pandemic.
Despite the limitations, each of these research pathways and the associated health measures (infection rate, mortality and excess mortality) are important in informing the public and policymakers about the impact of covid-19 mortality. .
“Our results confirm that the impact of covid-19 mortality is significant, not only in terms of death rates, but also in terms of years of lost lives”.
A study by a group of researchers from several international universities and research institutes, including speakers from the UPF Department of Economy and Business Héctor Pifarré i Arolas (first author) and Guillem López Casasnovas, both researchers at the Center for Research in Health and Economics (CRES -UPF), has estimated the impact of covid-19 premature death. It has done so by measuring years of lost life (YLL) due to covid-19 compared to YLL for other common illnesses, such as the flu or cardiovascular diseases.
The research, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports (Nature Research), also involved researchers Mikko Myrskylä, Enrique Acosta and Tim Riffe (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany); Adeline Lo (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), and Catia Nicodemo (University of Oxford) and was co-funded by the “la Caixa” Foundation.
“Our results confirm that the impact of covid-19 mortality is significant, not only in terms of death rates, but also in terms of years of lost lives”, confirm the authors, who consider their study as a snapshot of the pandemic situation in early 2021.
How many years of life were lost as a result of covid-19? And about other illnesses?
The years of loss of life are the difference between a person’s age at death and life expectancy. The researchers estimated YLL caused by covid-19 using data on more than 1,279,866 deaths in 81 countries. They also analyzed life expectancy data and made predictions of total deaths from covid-19 by country.
The authors estimate that covid-19 lost 20,507,518 years of life in the 81 countries included in this study.
The authors estimate that 20,507,518 years of life were lost as a result of covid-19 in the 81 countries included in this study, with an average of sixteen years per death. leth. Of the total YLL, 44.9% occurred in individuals between 55 and 75 years of age, 30.2% among persons under 55, and 25% in persons over 75. In the countries where records of the number of deaths by sex available, YLL was 44% higher in men than in women.
The rate of life lost due to the pandemic has been between two and nine times higher than the average YLL rate associated with seasonal flu.
In the countries most affected by covid-19, and for other common causes of death worldwide, the rate of loss of life years due to the pandemic is between two and nine times greater than the average rate of YLL associated with seasonal flu, and between 1/4 and 1/2 higher than the rate of YLL possible for heart disease.
Explanation of the results in the context of a pandemic
In 35 of the countries surveyed, the data coverage spans at least nine months; in these cases, this indicates that it is likely to absorb the full impact of the pandemic in 2020, or at least its first waves, and for other countries, the those numbers continue to rise. The authors warn that “these findings must be understood in the context of chronic pandemic disease; this study provides a detailed overview of the potential effects of covid-19 on years of life lost on January 6, 2021 ”.
“Estimates of years of life lost could be misunderstood, due to the difficulty of accurately recording 19 covid-19-related deaths.”
Furthermore, the authors suggest that “estimates of lost years of life may be reduced, due to the difficulty of recording covid-19-related deaths. right, because “both policies and practices regarding the coding of deaths are not merely their development and normalization.” Furthermore, they assert that the investigation is limited to analyzing premature death, and that a full assessment of the health impact of pandemic should consider the burden of disease-related disability.
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In addition to support from the “la Caixa” Foundation, this research has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Fonds du Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (Canada) and Oxford University’s Covid-19 Research Response Fund . (Britain).
Reference article: “Years of life lost by COVID-19 in 81 countries”, (February 2021). Pifarré i Arolas, H., Acosta, E., López Casasnovas, G., Lo A., Nicodemo, C., Riffe, T., Myrskylä, M. Scientific Reports
DOI: 10.1038 / s41598-021-83040-3
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