Years of life lost due to the psychosocial consequences of COVID19 mitigation | Hacker News Reader

Years of life lost due to the psychosocial consequences of COVID19 mitigation

medrxiv.org

2 pointsExmoor4 comments

> Additionally, the present projection is not all- encompassing concerning potential effects of confinement: such as (prolonged) grief, elder abuse, this version posted May 2, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license . increase of sedentary lifestyle or change of diet. The pandemic is also likely to have multiple additional consequences including distress due to job losses and financial hardship. The projection also does not model potentially positive changes in behaviour, for example reductions in car accidents and air pollution. Due to frequent co-occurrence of certain phenomena it is possible that a single individual may be affected by more than one of the factors presented. When possible, data were adjusted for age, sex and socioeconomics. However, for several factors, possibilities to do so were impeded by virtue of limitations of the current literature

So basically "look at these nice numbers, they might or might not have a meaning".

There are so many covariables, I have a hard time believing we have the tools to even gather the data we'd need to produce useable results on that topic.

Yes, it's certainly a very rough estimate based on questionable analogs. It is, however, the first attempt I've seen to make a scientific estimate of the question I've seen asked so many times in HN threads over the last few months.

> Results: The study projects that the average person would suffer 0.205 YLL due to psychosocial consequence of COVID-19 mitigation measures. However, this loss would be entirely borne by 2.1% of the population, who will suffer an average 9.79 YLL.

Doing the math for the US, based on a population estimate of 330 million:

0.205 * 330million = 68,265,000 years of life lost based on the data lost based on the data from this study.

68,265,000 / 78.6 years (Average life expectancy of the US [0]) = 866,511 lifetimes lost. IE, the same impact as this many 1 day old babies dying.

68,265,000 / 38.2 year (Median age of US resident [1]) = 1,787,041. IE, the same impact as this many median age residents dying.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241494/median-age-of-the...

They simply sum all the years of life lost. That would only be valid if the causes of life lost were independent which is not the case.

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