Americans Lost Over 5 Million Years Of Life To Covid-19

by Niall McCarthy, Jun 22, 2021

A Pew Research analysis of CDC data has put the human toll of Covid-19 in the U.S. into an even starker perspective. In addition to the total number of deaths from any given cause, researchers were able to estimate the total number of years lost by taking a person’s remaining life expectancy into account. An example of this is outlined by Pew who state that “if a person with a life expectancy of 80 dies at age 50, they are estimated to have lost 30 years of life”. There were 600,000 cancer deaths in the U.S. in 2019 and that toll equates to just over 10 million years of life lost while the 660,000 heart disease deaths saw 8.8 million life years lost.

According to a provisional CDC toll, Covid-19 was responsible for some 380,000 U.S. deaths last year which works out at around 5.5 million years of life lost. Last year, more years of life were lost due to the pandemic than all the accidents combined in a typical year including traffic accidents, drowning, firearm accidents and drug overdoses. It is also triple the number of years of life lost to diabetes or liver disease in a typical calendar year. The same dataset reveals that the average number of years lost in the U.S. per Covid-19 death last year was 14 compared to 12 years lost per stroke death, 17 years lost per cancer death and 31 years lost per accidental death in the year prior.