Coronavirus is killing people 13 years before they could have died of natural causes, finds study
The deadly coronavirus is killing people more than 10 years before they would have died of natural causes. On average, men who die of COVID-19 lose 13 years, while women lose about 11 years of their life expectancy, according to researchers.
Most reports have, so far, focussed on counting the number of deaths. But there has been little mention of years of life lost through COVID-19, which could give a more realistic measure of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, say experts. Accordingly, a team led by Dr David McAllister, Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellow at the Institute of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow, and honorary consultant in public health medicine at Public Health Scotland, analyzed the estimated years of life lost due to COVID-19.
The researchers say that as most people dying with COVID-19 are older with underlying chronic conditions, some have speculated that the impact of the condition may have been overstated and that the actual number of years of life lost as a result of COVID-19 are relatively low. However, the new analysis shows that death from COVID-19 results in over 10 years of life lost per person, even after taking account of the typical number and type of chronic conditions found in people dying of COVID-19. Among people dying of COVID-19, the number of years of life lost per person appears similar to diseases such as coronary heart disease or pneumonia, says the research team.
“Deaths from COVID-19 represent a substantial burden in terms of per-person years of life lost, more than a decade, even after adjusting for the typical number and type of underlying long-term conditions found in people dying of COVID-19,” say the researchers in their findings published in Wellcome Open Research, but yet to be peer-reviewed.
They add, “While media coverage of the pandemic has focused heavily on COVID-19 affecting people with ‘underlying health conditions,’ adjustment for number and type of long-term conditions only modestly reduces the estimated years of life lost due to COVID-19 compared to estimates based only on age and sex,” says the team.
As of May 2, over 238,660 people have died in the coronavirus pandemic globally, and more than 3,344,090 COVID-19 cases have been reported, shows the Johns Hopkins tracker.
The study examined estimated years of life lost due to COVID-19, before and after adjustment for number and type of chronic conditions. The researchers used information from Italy on the age at which people with COVID-19 died and the number and type of chronic conditions they had. The team then used World Health Organisation (WHO) life tables as well as data from the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL), a large UK healthcare database, to estimate how long people with these characteristics might otherwise have been expected to live.
According to the WHO’s years of life lost scale, a person aged 81, who died of COVID-19, has lost 14 years of his life. Those who died in their fifties without any underlying conditions lost around 35.81 years.
“For men, the average years of life lost, on adjusting for number and type of underlying long-term conditions, as well as age, was 13.1 (12.2-14.1). For women, this value was 10.5 (9.7-11.3). The results were similar under the different assumptions for the age-multimorbidity association. For comparison, the years of life lost based on age alone using the WHO tables was 14.0 and 11.8 for men and women, respectively,” says the study.
“Across most age and multimorbidity count strata, the estimated years of life lost per person remained substantial and generally above 5 years. This means that even after accounting for multimorbidity count, most individuals lost considerably more than the “1-2 years” suggested by some commentators, perhaps reflecting the high prevalence of multimorbidity in this population, especially in those over the age of 50 years,” says the study.
Based on their findings, the team says that public health agencies and governments should report on years of life lost, ideally adjusting for the presence of underlying long-term conditions, to allow the public and policy-makers to better understand the burden of this disease. “Information such as this is important to ensure governments and the public do not wrongly underestimate the effects of COVID-19 on individuals,” says the research team.