Researchers have estimated that a total of 20.5 million years of life have been lost due to Covid-19 worldwide with an average of 16 years per individual death.
“Our results confirm that the mortality impact of covid-19 is large, not only in terms of numbers of deaths, but also in terms of years of life lost,” said the authors, who consider their study a snapshot of the situation of the pandemic in early 2021.
The study by a group of researchers from several international universities and research centers, including Hector Pifarre I Arolas and Guillem Lopez Casasnovas, both researchers at the Centre for Research in Health and Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain has estimated the premature mortality impact of Covid-19.
They have done so by calculating years of life lost (YLL) due to covid-19 compared to YLL for other common illnesses, such as the flu or cardiovascular diseases.
The study involved data from 81 countries. They analyzed data on life expectancy and made projections of total deaths from Covid-19 by country.
In the countries for which records of the number of deaths by sex were available, YLL was 44 per cent higher in men than in women.
The authors warned that "these results must be understood in the context of an ongoing, evolving pandemic; this study is a snapshot of the possible impacts of Covid-19 on years of life lost on January 6, 2021".
(This story was published from a syndicated feed. Only the headline and picture has been edited by FIT).
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