In a new study from the University of Pennsylvania, researchers found that by the year 2017, the United States was already suffering more excess deaths and more life-years lost each year than those linked to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
In 2017, the United States suffered an estimated 401,000 total excess deaths, those beyond the “normal” number of deaths expected to have occurred.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 376,504 deaths related to COVID-19 in 2020.
In the study, the team aimed to make age-specific comparisons of U.S. and European mortality from 2000 to 2017.
They used data from the Human Mortality Database to create three indexes.
For the comparison, they selected the five largest European countries—Germany, England and Wales together, France, Italy, and Spain—whose combined population nears that of the U.S.
They chose these larger countries because small countries may have unique features such as climate, diet, social history, and health care that make them inappropriate models for larger and more diverse populations.
Even more striking was the mortality comparison between the U.S. and those five European countries when using the measure known as “years of life lost.”
This accounts for the age at which death occurs, giving more weight to death at a younger age.
In 2020, 4.41 million years of life were lost to COVID-19, yet that’s only about one-third of the 13.02 million life-years lost to excess mortality in the United States in 2017.
The team says the results underscore the routine and persistent daily health hazards that Americans face.
They do not want to diminish the tremendous losses due to COVID-19 in the U.S. and elsewhere. They just hope to put the U.S. mortality disadvantage into perspective.
The researchers say that identifying and remediating the factors that contribute to this massive loss of life should be a national priority.
If you care about COVID-19, please read studies about people died of COVID-19 have these 3 common symptoms and findings of people with this heart disease have low risk of COVID-19.
For more information about COVID-19 prevention and treatment, please see recent studies about some pre-existing conditions triple Covid-19 death risk and results showing a new way to predict who will get severe COVID-19 and die.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One author of the study is Samuel Preston.
Copyright © 2021 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.