CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 287Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk ManagementCOVID-19 epidemiological studiesHealthcare Systems and Public Health

Demographic perspectives on the mortality of COVID-19 and other epidemics

Open access
Goldstein, Joshua R., Lee, Ronald D.·2020·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI 10.1073/pnas.2006392117PMC PMC7486771
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Significance: What would a hypothetical 1 million US deaths in the COVID-19 epidemic mean for mortality of individuals at the population level? Life expectancy for 2020 would drop by 2.9 y. Those dying would lose an average of 11.7 y of expected remaining life, while for the general population the loss of remaining life would be 0.2 y for elders (at age 80) and much less at younger ages. Mortality per person would be less than that of the Spanish flu, but closer to that of the opioid and HIV/AIDS epidemics, while far more concentrated in time. The standard valuation of averting 1.75 million deaths would be many trillions of dollars.

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.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1073/pnas.2006392117

Cites

16 of 17 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

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 Covid-19 pandemic has compressed deaths in a short time span compared to other epidemics of the posttransitional world.

    “The Covid‐19 pandemic has compressed deaths in a short time span compared to other epidemics of the posttransitional world (Goldstein and Lee 2020)”

    From Demography: Fast and Slow (2022) · cites this paper as Goldstein and Lee 2020

    The Loss of Remaining Life section says a hypothetical 1 million US COVID-19 deaths could occur within a year or even 3–4 months, whereas comparable HIV and opioid deaths accumulated over decades. This supports the short-time-span comparison, but the paper presents it as a scenario and does not establish the claim for other epidemics of the posttransitional world generally. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Because the risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 increases exponentially with age, Africa-and sub-Saharan Africa in particular-has recorded relatively fewer deaths, despite very limited containment policies and generally inadequate health systems.

    “Because the risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 increases exponentially with age,189 it is not surprising that Africa—and sub-Saharan Africa in particular—has recorded relatively fewer deaths, despite very limited containment policies and generally inadequate health systems.”

    From The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic (2022) · cites this paper as [189]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. [13]Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, 2020-2023 value assessment framework. https://icer-review.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ICER_2020_2023_VAF_013120-4.pdf. Accessed 31 March 2020.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Goldstein, J. R., & Lee, R. D.
Affiliations
University of California, Berkeley (US)
Corresponding author
  • Goldstein, Joshua R.
  • Lee, Ronald D.
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Published
2020-08-20
Volume
117
Issue
36
Pages
22035-22041
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2006392117
PMC
PMC7486771
OpenAlex
W3017550043
Cited by
287
References
16
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 29 · 2023: 38 · 2022: 71 · 2021: 94 · 2020: 22
FWCI
84.79
Type
journal article
Language
en
Update notices
correction (2020-11-02)
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Funders
  • HHS | NIH | National Institute on Aging (5P30AG012839, R01AG058940)
  • HHS | NIH | Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD072964)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Demography › Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management
  • Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Modeling and Simulation › COVID-19 epidemiological studies
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Epidemiology › Healthcare Systems and Public Health
Keywords
COVID-19 mortality, age-specific mortality, period life expectancy, years of life lost, HIV/AIDS epidemic, opioid overdose epidemic, 1918 influenza pandemic, all-cause mortality
MeSH terms
Betacoronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Demography, Humans, Life Expectancy, Mortality, Pneumonia, Viral, United States, Cost of Illness, Coronavirus Infections, History, 20th Century, History, 21st Century, Epidemics, Pandemics

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