New Study on Corona Consequences: Austria Lost 350,000 Life Years
More than half of these would have been spent by the affected individuals in relatively good health, according to the estimate. Besides Covid itself, a large portion of the "lost years" is also attributed to the circumstances accompanying the pandemic, such as disruptions in medical care.
In health sciences, "healthy life years" refers to the number of remaining years that a person is expected to live without moderate or severe health limitations from a certain age. Since this value typically decreases significantly in very elderly people, and it quickly became clear after the emergence of Covid-19 that the high-risk group mainly consisted of very old people, there were also voices pointing out that the loss of healthy years might be comparatively low - a thesis that the new study results do not particularly support.
Vaccinations Reduced Covid-Related Excess Mortality
In Austria and most other European countries, strict and increasingly controversial regulations for large segments of the population were known to be implemented as the pandemic progressed. In contrast, Sweden focused its containment measures heavily on older individuals. The research team led by Sara Ahmadi-Abhari from Imperial College London, along with colleagues from Poland, Finland, and the USA, has now attempted to estimate the lost life years in 18 European countries based on statistical data, rather than analyzing the impact of measures, in the journal "Plos Medicine".
In the main pandemic years 2020 to 2022, their analysis in all the countries studied shows nearly 17 million lost years. The main cause of this was deaths with Covid-19. With the start of vaccination campaigns and their widespread rollout, the excess mortality attributable to the disease itself noticeably decreased in the years 2021 and 2022.
Austria "Lost" Around 70 Life Years Per 1,000 Inhabitants
However: The proportion of lost years during the pandemic that were not directly attributable to Covid-19 was considerable according to the analysis - namely between 3.6 and 5.3 million life years. And this proportion did not decrease when the Covid-19 vaccinations began to take effect. On the contrary: Non-Covid excess mortality actually increased in most countries during the study period.
For Austria, the study shows a loss of nearly 90,000 life years in the first year of the pandemic and in the following years - with significantly stronger Covid waves - around 123,000 (2021) and 140,000 years (2022). When distributing the lost years across the total population, Austria, with around 70 years lost per 1,000 inhabitants, is rather in the lower middle range of the 18 countries studied. While in Estonia, Poland, Spain, Hungary, and the Czech Republic the most life years were lost proportionally - namely over or around 100 per 1,000 inhabitants - it was relatively few in Switzerland, Denmark, or Sweden - around 20. For Germany, the scientists determined a value of around 50 lost life years per 1,000 people. Except in Sweden, by the end of 2022, the life expectancy of people over 35 years did not return to the level of 2019 in any country.
Corona: Even Older People Lost Some "Healthy Life Years"
As in most of the countries studied, more than half of the lost time in Austria could have been spent in relatively good health. According to the authors, this shows that the disruptions of the pandemic were even rather underestimated, as they also cost many "healthy life years" for people over 80. Countries with generally higher average incomes were able to better limit the loss overall, and women lost significantly fewer life years than men. This also shows that socioeconomic and gender differences have generally intensified.
Especially the finding that the pandemic also led to excess mortality among people who did not die from or with Covid-19 "shows the broad impacts of the pandemic," Ahmadi-Abhari is quoted as saying. According to the lead author, these deaths were likely due to failures in healthcare provision - experts have repeatedly warned of such "collateral damage" from containment measures during the pandemic. The findings from their calculations would in any case "show the urgent need for a comprehensive pandemic preparedness program" that takes into account both the short- and long-term effects on public health, according to Ahmadi-Abhari.
(APA/Red)
This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.