A Comprehensive Measure of Lifeyears Lost due to COVID-19 in 2020: A Comparison across Countries and with Past Disasters.

ABSTRACT: Typically, disaster damages are measured separately in four dimensions: fatalities, injuries, dislocations, and the financial damage that they wreak. Noy (2016) developed a lifeyears index of disaster damage which aggregates these disparate measures. Here, we use this lifeyears index to assess the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic across countries and compare these costs to the average annual costs of all other disasters that have occurred in all countries in the past 20 years. We find that the costs of the pandemic, measured for 2020, far outweigh the annual costs associated with other disasters in the past two decades. It is the economic loss that dominates this impact. The human and social implications of this economic loss are plausibly much greater than the direct toll in mortality and m

SUBMITTER: Doan VN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8652480 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature