Different approaches to quantify years of life lost from COVID-19.
Eur J Epidemiol
; 36(6): 589-597, 2021 Jun.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1265534
Preprint
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This scientific journal article is probably based on a previously available preprint. It has been identified through a machine matching algorithm, human confirmation is still pending.
See preprint
ABSTRACT
The burden of an epidemic is often characterized by death counts, but this can be misleading as it fails to acknowledge the age of the deceased patients. Years of life lost is therefore widely used as a more relevant metric, however, such calculations in the context of COVID-19 are all biased upwards patients dying from COVID-19 are typically multimorbid, having far worse life expectation than the general population. These questions are quantitatively investigated using a unique Hungarian dataset that contains individual patient level data on comorbidities for all COVID-19 deaths in the country. To account for the comorbidities of the patients, a parametric survival model using 11 important long-term conditions was used to estimate a more realistic years of life lost. As of 12 May, 2021, Hungary reported a total of 27,837 deaths from COVID-19 in patients above 50 years of age. The usual calculation indicates 10.5 years of life lost for each death, which decreases to 9.2 years per death after adjusting for 11 comorbidities. The expected number of years lost implied by the life table, reflecting the mortality of a developed country just before the pandemic is 11.1 years. The years of life lost due to COVID-19 in Hungary is therefore 12% or 1.3 years per death lower when accounting for the comorbidities and is below its expected value, but how this should be interpreted is still a matter of debate. Further research is warranted on how to optimally integrate this information into epidemiologic risk assessments during a pandemic.
Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Life Expectancy
/
Life Tables
/
Multimorbidity
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Prognostic study
Limits:
Aged
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
/
Middle aged
Country/Region as subject:
Europa
Language:
English
Journal:
Eur J Epidemiol
Journal subject:
Epidemiology
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
S10654-021-00774-0
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