5 ms·

Is this estimating the right quantity? Wouldn't it be more relevant to estimate the total number of years of human life lost due to covid, rather than the numbe

Is this estimating the right quantity? Wouldn't it be more relevant to estimate the total number of years of human life lost due to covid, rather than the number of deaths attributable to covid?

ceejayoz 5y ago
I’d imagine that’s a lot more difficult.
- falcor84 5y ago
  It would be more difficult, but I don't think it has to be "a lot more difficult". The code could make a lookup in the actuarial life tables for each country to get the expected remaining years of life for a person of that age, and then just aggregate these, no?
  - klmadfejno 5y ago
    Ballpark yes, but that's likely a huge overestimate, as even normalized to age, its people with co-morbidities that have the lion's share of deaths.
    - falcor84 5y ago
      Yeah, you can of course keep approximating it. The next adjustment would then probably be to use something like quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY) based on the persons co-morbidity, and then (if you want to) your could also take it the other way and reduce QALY for survivors with long-covid.
- codyb 5y ago
  Definitely an interesting problem though. You'd probably want to gather life expectancy rates for individuals once they reached five years of age (since infant mortality necessarily lowers life expectancy but after a cliff people who make it tend to live longer than the average with a bunch of 0s, 1s, and 2s in it) for each country in question. Then you'd need stats for the age of the dead in each country which I guess you don't really have in most cases since the deaths aren't aggregated anywhere since they haven't been attributed to COVID. Thanks to the Economist for publishing their model. Would be neat to see more stuff like this. I haven't delved too deeply into the code (several 1000 line scripts which would take some sussing out) but it's nice people will have real world projects they can delve into.
Taek 5y ago
You could make an argument that society as a whole should start looking at things that way, but personally I'd have no basis for understanding how that translated to damage. 3 million people dead is a number that I have a lot of mental models around, it's easy for me to get a sense of magnitude that way. 50 million human years lost is a lot less relatable number and I'm not sure how to contextualize it. It might also be interesting to measure the cost of the pandemic in terms of economic harm, how much the GDP dropped, how much production was lost, how many stores closed, etc.
- xwdv 5y ago
  It's easy to contextualize. 50 million human years lost means that people would have to put in 50 million human years worth of work to recover the economic loss of COVID-19. Consider the average human worker. In their life, they will output around 10.5 human years worth of work. 50 million years represents the total output of about 4.76 million human lives. So if you delete the production of 3 million people due to COVID deaths plus all the time spent in lockdowns, 50 million human years lost sounds about right, but probably could be higher. I'd say it's probably about 80 million human years lost.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Perhaps the value of a human life is that they are alive, not the hours of work they produce during that lifetime.
  - bb611 5y ago
    Valuing people as primarily their economic output is anti-social to the point of being dystopian, and we have much better economic indicators than arbitrary heuristics when we do want to understand the economic damage of the pandemic.
    - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
      Right. Think of this as "50 million years of opportunities for grandchildren to get to know their grandparents or 50 million years of time spent as a widow after your elderly husband dies" as well as just the economic cost.
bloak 5y ago
I don't think that "total number of years of human life lost" is a good general-purpose measure. Specialists could perhaps apply that measure to the deaths of old people (people over retirement age?) but it would be crazy, in my opinion, to apply it to the death of a baby or a teenager. As the hypothetical trolley controller, how many 50-year-olds would you kill to save one 16-year-old? And would you kill the 16-year-old to save a one-week-old baby?
- fullshark 5y ago
  I thought regulatory bodies considered age when considering regulations and the value of statistical life. Hence why regulations regarding kids toys / child safety products are so much stronger than say a toy for adults. Quick google search doesn't confirm or refute this, merely that the average VSL in america is 10 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life This does have this tidbit: "Historically, children were valued little monetarily, but changes in cultural norms have resulted in a substantial increase as evinced by trends in damage compensation from wrongful death lawsuits.[38]"
- benlivengood 5y ago
  > As the hypothetical trolley controller, how many 50-year-olds would you kill to save one 16-year-old? And would you kill the 16-year-old to save a one-week-old baby? Organ donation prioritization does this analysis all the time. They don't publish the exact rules they use for matching but the most important are urgency, compatibility, locality, and survival benefit. Survival benefit is almost literally expected quality life years (QALY) from an organ transplant. A 98-year old will not get an organ that could give a 50-year old another 20 years of life, but a 20-year old that can survive for another year will not get an organ that the 50-year old needs this week. Compatibility and locality are the biggest problems apart from basic availability (too few organ donors, too many patients needing transplants). Once we can print/grow organs the calculus will reduce to prioritization on urgency and then QALYs if supply is still constrained in some way.
fullshark 5y ago
Economists and public policy wonks should do this for sure, as we make sense of the costs and benefits of certain policies. I imagine there will be 10 years of papers to come from this, and no agreement at all on what policies were worth it.
efxhoy 5y ago
Change in quality adjusted life years, or variants thereof, are one standard for health-economic evaluation but are obviously very hard to get quality data on. That would capture not only years of life lost but also the quality of those years. Long-covid seems to be a serious issue for a lot of people and an accurate estimate of that impact would be very valuable.
thebruce87m 5y ago
This article tries to do this: “1.5 million potential years of life lost to COVID-19 in the UK, with each life cut short by 10 years on average” https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-potential-years-of-life-lost-to-covid-19 https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...
austhrow743 5y ago
If you're going to break things down to that extent you'd probably want to use quality adjusted life years.

Is this estimating the right quantity? Wouldn't it be more relevant to estimate the total number of years of human life lost due to covid, rather than the number of deaths attributable to covid?

ceejayoz 5y ago

I’d imagine that’s a lot more difficult.

falcor84 5y ago
It would be more difficult, but I don't think it has to be "a lot more difficult". The code could make a lookup in the actuarial life tables for each country to get the expected remaining years of life for a person of that age, and then just aggregate these, no?
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  Ballpark yes, but that's likely a huge overestimate, as even normalized to age, its people with co-morbidities that have the lion's share of deaths.
  - falcor84 5y ago
    Yeah, you can of course keep approximating it. The next adjustment would then probably be to use something like quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY) based on the persons co-morbidity, and then (if you want to) your could also take it the other way and reduce QALY for survivors with long-covid.
codyb 5y ago
Definitely an interesting problem though. You'd probably want to gather life expectancy rates for individuals once they reached five years of age (since infant mortality necessarily lowers life expectancy but after a cliff people who make it tend to live longer than the average with a bunch of 0s, 1s, and 2s in it) for each country in question. Then you'd need stats for the age of the dead in each country which I guess you don't really have in most cases since the deaths aren't aggregated anywhere since they haven't been attributed to COVID. Thanks to the Economist for publishing their model. Would be neat to see more stuff like this. I haven't delved too deeply into the code (several 1000 line scripts which would take some sussing out) but it's nice people will have real world projects they can delve into.

Taek 5y ago

You could make an argument that society as a whole should start looking at things that way, but personally I'd have no basis for understanding how that translated to damage. 3 million people dead is a number that I have a lot of mental models around, it's easy for me to get a sense of magnitude that way. 50 million human years lost is a lot less relatable number and I'm not sure how to contextualize it. It might also be interesting to measure the cost of the pandemic in terms of economic harm, how much the GDP dropped, how much production was lost, how many stores closed, etc.

xwdv 5y ago
It's easy to contextualize. 50 million human years lost means that people would have to put in 50 million human years worth of work to recover the economic loss of COVID-19. Consider the average human worker. In their life, they will output around 10.5 human years worth of work. 50 million years represents the total output of about 4.76 million human lives. So if you delete the production of 3 million people due to COVID deaths plus all the time spent in lockdowns, 50 million human years lost sounds about right, but probably could be higher. I'd say it's probably about 80 million human years lost.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Perhaps the value of a human life is that they are alive, not the hours of work they produce during that lifetime.
- bb611 5y ago
  Valuing people as primarily their economic output is anti-social to the point of being dystopian, and we have much better economic indicators than arbitrary heuristics when we do want to understand the economic damage of the pandemic.
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    Right. Think of this as "50 million years of opportunities for grandchildren to get to know their grandparents or 50 million years of time spent as a widow after your elderly husband dies" as well as just the economic cost.

bloak 5y ago

I don't think that "total number of years of human life lost" is a good general-purpose measure. Specialists could perhaps apply that measure to the deaths of old people (people over retirement age?) but it would be crazy, in my opinion, to apply it to the death of a baby or a teenager. As the hypothetical trolley controller, how many 50-year-olds would you kill to save one 16-year-old? And would you kill the 16-year-old to save a one-week-old baby?

fullshark 5y ago
I thought regulatory bodies considered age when considering regulations and the value of statistical life. Hence why regulations regarding kids toys / child safety products are so much stronger than say a toy for adults. Quick google search doesn't confirm or refute this, merely that the average VSL in america is 10 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life This does have this tidbit: "Historically, children were valued little monetarily, but changes in cultural norms have resulted in a substantial increase as evinced by trends in damage compensation from wrongful death lawsuits.[38]"
benlivengood 5y ago
> As the hypothetical trolley controller, how many 50-year-olds would you kill to save one 16-year-old? And would you kill the 16-year-old to save a one-week-old baby? Organ donation prioritization does this analysis all the time. They don't publish the exact rules they use for matching but the most important are urgency, compatibility, locality, and survival benefit. Survival benefit is almost literally expected quality life years (QALY) from an organ transplant. A 98-year old will not get an organ that could give a 50-year old another 20 years of life, but a 20-year old that can survive for another year will not get an organ that the 50-year old needs this week. Compatibility and locality are the biggest problems apart from basic availability (too few organ donors, too many patients needing transplants). Once we can print/grow organs the calculus will reduce to prioritization on urgency and then QALYs if supply is still constrained in some way.

fullshark 5y ago

Economists and public policy wonks should do this for sure, as we make sense of the costs and benefits of certain policies. I imagine there will be 10 years of papers to come from this, and no agreement at all on what policies were worth it.

efxhoy 5y ago

Change in quality adjusted life years, or variants thereof, are one standard for health-economic evaluation but are obviously very hard to get quality data on. That would capture not only years of life lost but also the quality of those years. Long-covid seems to be a serious issue for a lot of people and an accurate estimate of that impact would be very valuable.

thebruce87m 5y ago

This article tries to do this: “1.5 million potential years of life lost to COVID-19 in the UK, with each life cut short by 10 years on average” https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-potential-years-of-life-lost-to-covid-19 https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...

austhrow743 5y ago

If you're going to break things down to that extent you'd probably want to use quality adjusted life years.