Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 49 countries: A gender- and life cycle-based analysis of the first two years of the pandemic

Oscar Espinosa, Jeferson Ramos, Maylen Liseth Rojas-Botero and Julián Alfredo Fernández-Niño

PLOS Global Public Health, 2023, vol. 3, issue 9, 1-14

Abstract: Specific mortality rates have been widely used to monitor the main impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, a more meaningful measure is the Years of Life Lost (YLL) due to the disease, considering it takes into account the premature nature of each death. We estimated the YLL due to COVID-19 between January 2020 and December 2021 in 49 countries for which information was available, developing an analytical method that mathematically refines that proposed by the World Health Organization. We then calculated YLL rates overall, as well as by sex and life cycle. Additionally, we estimated the national cost-effective budgets required to manage COVID-19 from a health system perspective. During the two years of analysis, we estimated that 85.6 million years of life were lost due to COVID-19 in the 49 countries studied. However, due to a lack of data, we were unable to analyze the burden of COVID-19 in about 75% of the countries in the world. We found no difference in the magnitude of YLL rates by gender but did find differences according to life cycle, with older adults contributing the greatest burden of YLL. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant burden of disease, which has varied between countries. However, due to the lack of quality and disaggregated data, it has been difficult to monitor and compare the pandemic internationally. Therefore, it is imperative to strengthen health information systems in order to prepare for future pandemics as well as to evaluate their impacts.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/artic ... journal.pgph.0002172 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/artic ... 02172&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pgph00:0002172

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0002172

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Global Public Health from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by globalpubhealth ().