What % of U.S. lifespans were lost to covid?
Life expectancies dropped 3% from 2019 to 2021, but is that the ideal measure of covid's toll?
Life expectancy in the U.S. got hammered by covid and other bad things of the early 2020s (like fentanyl, homicides, and car crashes), dropping from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.4 in 2021, before rebounding to 78.4 in 2023.
The drop from 2019 to 2021 is about three percent.
But does that mean covid cost Americans approaching three percent of their lifespans?
If true, that would be a vast number. But I’ve now got a different methodology for estimating the true cost of covid, which I will explain later.
I got started on this topic when Tyler Cowen wrote:
A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. We also got a vaccine in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often “lockdowns” were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case. Most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.
Ehhh …
Paywall here.
Everybody remembers what they got right about covid or their opponents got wrong, but nobody remembers what their rivals were correct about or they were incorrect about.
Awhile ago, I looked up a column I published about coronavirus on March 18, 2020 and started reading at a random point in the middle.
I was astonished by the brilliant insights in the first two sentences I read! How did I grasp the truth about this novel virus so early?
But then ...
I read two more sentences. They now seemed absurdly stupid. What a maroon I was!
The whole column seemed like that: a 50% accuracy rate. In other words, I could have just flipped a coin and been as correct, without doing all the work I had put in to try to figure out this new phenomenon.
(Thinking about this, I’m probably being overly tough on my self. I could have boosted my correctness percentage from, say, 50% to 60% by putting in a bunch of banal truisms. But I try to say things that are new and or at least interesting. Usually, I get a much higher percentage right by doing my research. But with covid in 2020, nobody knew much. So I wound up with a column where I could have reversed every assertion and been just as right.)
Lots of people, however, haven’t gone through the humbling process of going back and rereading random samples of what they wrote in 2020-21, so all they can remember is getting X, Y, and Z right (while totally forgetting about getting A, B, and C wrong).
Further, a geneticist pointed out to me recently that the covid pandemic tended to fall right about the midpoint in severity where it's hard to objectively decide if we over-reacted or under-reacted.
For example, covid killed a lot of people. The official death count from covid is right around 1.2 million, while the number of excess deaths above the 2015-2019 trendline is approaching 1.3 million. It appears that covid fatalities were slightly undercounted in the first months of the pandemic, and then accurately counted after that. Yeah, I know a lot of people believe covid deaths were overstated by counting people who died with covid instead of people who died from covid, but they are wrong.
Total excess deaths from all causes repeatedly surged a few weeks after covid cases surged.
1.2 million deaths is about 0.36% of the US population of 330 million in 2020.
On the other hand, covid victims tended to be old and/or unhealthy. Fairly early in the pandemic, I started following Wikipedia’s list of covid victims who were noteworthy enough to have a Wikipedia page. (Note, you don’t have to be noteworthy to have a Wikipedia page. I, for example, have one, which has been mostly created by obsessives obsessed with slandering me.)
I expected to see a lot of current celebrities popping up, since popular celebrities get around and talk to a lot of people. (Early in the pandemic, Norm Macdonald called it “Tom Hanks’ Disease.”)
But that didn’t much happen. Famous people did die of covid, but most of them were well past the primes of their careers. In contrast, the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed lots of people in their youth or midlife, like the Prime Minister of South Africa Louis Botha and 49-year-old Frederick Trump, so its human capital cost was far higher, leaving lots of orphans.
So, my new approach is to figure out how many years of lifespan covid cost Americans. Assume the average American is 38.7 years old and would live another 40 years and that there were 330 million people in the US in 2020. So that would imply the population at the beginning of the covid epidemic had 13,200,000,000 more years to live.
The highest estimate I’ve seen for how many Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs discount years spent in comas, dementia, or horrifying pain, although not by all that much) the average covid fatality cost is 12.4 years. For 1.2 million fatalities, that would be 14.9 million years of life lost.
So, that would be 0.12% percent of U.S. lifespans lost due to covid.
I haven’t seen that calculation before.
0.12% of lifespan lost among the average American is the kind of number that's hard to say whether it's too small to worry about or a massive catastrophe.
Also, we don't what to multiply it by to measure the alternative timeline world in which we didn't do NPIs and/or the vax. I would guess that would be a factor of several times, so we are talking about 2 million to 8 million deaths, say.
The New York City numbers in March 2020 when covid arrived with zero NPIs in place is pretty scary. Of course, NYC doctors didn't have much of a clue how to treat covid in March 2020 and wrecked a lot of patients by ventilating them, but by the end of April 2020 ER doctors were doing a good job of getting the word out to other doctors about what they had learned the hard way.
Another question is what happens if the government doesn't impose lockdowns? Do people lock themselves down? A comparison of daily life in Sweden and Denmark might help answer that question.
My rule of thumb when looking at covid infection maps for the US in 2021-22 was that when infection rates hit about 100 in a locality with less strict government rules, the population would voluntarily hunker down.
In general, in 2021-2022, infection and death rates were considerably lower in Blue places likes the Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston than in Red areas. But Red areas would tend to voluntarily hunker down when infection waves got bad until they diminished. In other words, leaving aside government policy, the Blue attitude among the populace tended to be preventive, the Red attitude reactive. I.e., covid does most of its hard in a few discrete waves, so is it better to focus on preventing waves from starting or to live your life until a wave gets going and then hunker down?
I'd suggest somebody try to calculate the costs and benefits of both approaches.
I am sorry to say I don't know who Tyler Cowen is. I knew only one person who died of Covid, a 72-year old formerly homeless woman named Margaret who once attended our church. About 2016, someone in our church figured Margaret was eligible for Social Security and Medicare, did the legwork, and had Margaret placed in an old folks home with the help of her retired brother. Margaret died in April, 2020 of Covid at the old folks home. I guess she would have been better off homeless and sleeping at shelters and bus stops.
Covid seems to have culled a lot of old folks who were near the end of their lives. Talk radio blabbermouth Larry King, age 87. Country singer Charlie Pride, age 86. All time home run leader- sorry, Barry Bonds, you're a cheat- Hank Aaron, age 86. General Colin Powell, age 84. Pitching ace Tom Seaver, age 75. Ace spit-balling pitcher Gaylord Perry, age 84.
The closing down of the economy affected tens of millions of people and tens of thousands of businesses. I am sure nobody on the left cares about that. The left thinks the economy is run by the magic wand of government. Some on the right don't much care either. In Washington DC, where I had a business, the business district was closed down for over four years. Restaurants went out of business. Clothiers went out of business. Bars went out of business. Print shops went out of business. Parking garages went out of business. The value of the office buildings in the downtown of Washington declined precipitously with few customers downtown. Hundreds of thousands of people in just DC were put in economic hardship due to the idiotic closing down of the economy. It is hard to quantify these people unlike the 1.4 million who died of Covid according to CNN but it was fun for CNN to have a running count of Covid dead while the hated Trump was president. For the most part, Covid and the closedown of the economy was just a leftist trick to destroy Donald Trump. And it worked in 2020.