“Abstract: This paper quantifies the net impact (direct and indirect effects) of the pandemic on the United States population in 2020 using three metrics: excess deaths, life expectancy, and total years of life lost. The findings indicate there were 375,235 excess deaths, with 83% attributable to direct, and 17% attributable to indirect effects of COVID-19 [i.e., 63,790 = 375,235 * 0.17]. The decrease in life expectancy was 1.67 years, translating to a reversion of 14 years in historical life expectancy gains. Total years of life lost in 2020 was 7,362,555 across the USA (73% directly attributable, 27% indirectly attributable to COVID-19), with considerable heterogeneity at the individual state level.”
© 2021 Chan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.