Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 81 countries
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 81 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. We find that over 20.5 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 globally. As of January 6, 2021, YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza; three quarters of the YLL result from deaths in ages below 75 and almost a third from deaths below 55; and men have lost 45% more life years than women. The results confirm the large mortality impact of COVID-19 among the elderly. They also call for heightened awareness in devising policies that protect vulnerable demographics losing the largest number of life-years.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The measure of years of life lost is affected by population age structure and therefore comparisons between countries and over time are not precise.
“However, this measure of life lost is affected by population age structure and therefore comparisons between countries and over time are not precise.”
From Quantifying impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through life-expectancy losses: a population-level study of 29 countries (2022) · cites this paper as [4]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 22 · Cited by 312
- Authors
- Pifarré i Arolas, H., Acosta, E., López-Casasnovas, G., Lo, A., Nicodemo, C., Riffe, T., & Myrskylä, M.
- Affiliations
- Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (DE)
- University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- University of Helsinki (FI)
- Venue
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2021-02-18
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 3504-3504
- ISSN
- 2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7892867
- OpenAlex
- W3130240926
- Cited by
- 312
- References
- 22
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 47 · 2022: 63 · 2021: 148 · 2020: 3 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 27.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- correction (2021-04-14)
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Scientific Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- medRxiv (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Brunel University Research Archive (BURA) (Brunel University London) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja (submittedVersion)
- Repositori digital de la UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- “la Caixa” Foundation (COVID-19)
- University of Oxford
- Economic and Social Research Council (ES/T008415/1)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Modeling and Simulation › COVID-19 epidemiological studies
- Social Sciences › Demography › Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Infectious Diseases › COVID-19 Clinical Research Studies
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, years of life lost, premature mortality, excess mortality, attributable mortality, age-specific mortality, sex differences in mortality, older adults, seasonal influenza comparison, vulnerable populations
- MeSH terms
- COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Cause of Death, Communicable Disease Control, Female, Humans, Life Expectancy, Male, Global Health
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
