The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported a sharp drop in life expectancy as a result of COVID-19, a story that was covered in all media. But I don’t know what this really means.
Life expectancy at birth, concepts used With CDC releaseIs, for example, the average number of years a newborn will live in 2019 if the observed mortality rate in 2019 is experienced at each age. According to the CDC, life expectancy for Americans in 2019 was 78.8 years.
After that, COVID was a hit, killing more than 500,000 people. As a result, the observed mortality rates in 2020 and 2021 will be higher than in 2019, and life expectancy for newborns will be shorter. Using data from the first half of 2020, the CDC predicts that life expectancy at birth will decrease by one year to 77.8 by 2020.
But my question is about 2022. Given that masks, distancing, and vaccines defeated COVID in 2021, why should 2022 mortality be different from 2019? If nothing else is happening, the mortality rates, or life expectancy, of the two newborn crops in 2019 and 2022 should be the same. (Ignore this argument that other things are happening. Most importantly, “death of despair” — deaths from opioids, alcohol, and suicide have put downward pressure on life expectancy since 2014. .)
Therefore, while life expectancy incorporates the effects of COVID in 2020 and 2021, this exercise does not provide insight into long-term trends or the severity of the COVID pandemic.
Two Berkeley demographers Life expectancy exaggerates the impact of one-shot events.. As mentioned above, the impact is not only temporary, but the magnitude of the change reflects the tacit assumption that a pandemic occurs each year in human life. Instead, they suggest that a more useful way to measure epidemic severity is “lost life.” The author advances three figures.
Figure 1 below shows the number of deaths from COVID-19 compared to the Spanish flu, HIV and opioids. The HIV epidemic that peaked in the 1990s and the ongoing opioid deaths are relatively low on an annual basis, but they occur over decades and can be costly. In terms of absolute numbers, COVID deaths are below the previous epidemic.
Figure 2 reports the number of deaths per 1000 people, taking into account the size of the population at that time. This measurement shows that the Spanish flu produced the highest mortality rate.
Finally, Figure 3 incorporates the age at which the individual died into the comparison. Basically, COVID-19 affected the elderly, but the Spanish flu devastated people in their twenties. HIV and opioid epidemics have also affected young people. Therefore, in the lost years of life, other epidemics have dramatically surpassed COVID-19.
The point of this discussion is not to minimize the tragedy caused by COVID-19, but to measure its effects in a wise way. Changes in life expectancy only affect estimates for 2020 and 2021, making them meaningless as indicators for measuring the effects of COVID-19. The calculations implicitly assume that as a person grows older, epidemics occur many times.
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