Impact of COVID-19 on excess mortality, life expectancy, and years of life lost in the United States.

Davy Cheng,Janet Martin,Boris Bikbov,Eunice Y. S. Chan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0256835

Abstract

This paper quantifies the net impact (direct and indirect effects) of the pandemic on the United States population in 2020 using three metrics: excess deaths, life expectancy, and total years of life lost. The findings indicate there were 375,235 excess deaths, with 83% attributable to direct, and 17% attributable to indirect effects of COVID-19. The decrease in life expectancy was 1.67 years, translating to a reversion of 14 years in historical life expectancy gains. Total years of life lost in 2020 was 7,362,555 across the USA (73% directly attributable, 27% indirectly attributable to COVID-19), with considerable heterogeneity at the individual state level.

Highlights

With more than 375,000 COVID-19 deaths in the year 2020, the United States have been heavily affected by the pandemic
Our findings suggest that there was a total of 375,235 excess deaths (95% PI: 132,380, 618,088), with 83% attributed to direct and 17% attributed to indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2020
The male population of the United States had an excess of 220,457 deaths (59% of the fitted number of excess deaths), whereas the female population had an excess of 154,669 deaths (41% of the total number of excess deaths)

Summary

Introduction

With more than 375,000 COVID-19 deaths in the year 2020, the United States have been heavily affected by the pandemic. Due to the high number of COVID-19 deaths and limited health resources especially early in the pandemic, many healthcare resources were diverted to prioritize treating COVID-19 patients. This has garnered many concerns that treatment for other common diseases has been neglected and has attributed to the increase in time-sensitive non-COVID-19 deaths. We used three global metrics in health to quantify the impact that COVID-19 has had in the United States: excess mortality, life expectancy (LE), and years of life lost (YLL). We define the impact on population health due to COVID-19 deaths alone as direct effects, and the impact attributable to other causes as indirect effects of COVID-19

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