A new study conducted on Thursday is one of the first to try to measure the deaths during the pandemic that were caused not by the virus itself, but by the economic devastation it caused. The study estimates that the rise in unemployment seen in the spring of last year has contributed to an additional 30,000 deaths among working-age adults in the United States in the past year.
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) analyzed various data sources to come up with their numbers, including government-collected data on reported unemployment and mortality in 2020. Last year saw the highest reported monthly unemployment rate – 14.7% in April 2020 – seen since the Great Depression. They then mapped these data to previous estimates of how much a sudden rise in unemployment could contribute to the excess of deaths that would not have happened otherwise.
By their calculations, the spring decline in pandemic-related jobs will lead to an excessive death toll of 30,231 Americans between the ages of 25 and 64, from April 2020 to March 2021.
Team discoveries, published In the American Journal of Public Health, there is some uncertainty. Using different assumptions about the increased risk of death from unemployment or based on different measures of unemployment (some measures include people who are able to work but are not currently looking for a job as unemployed, for example, while others no) they changed their math. So, in different scenarios, pandemic unemployment-related deaths ranged from 8,315 to 201,968.
Because the study’s findings are based solely on modeling the estimated number of deaths, it cannot show us exactly what could have caused these deaths. But job losses are known to contribute to poorer physical and mental health, often because people end up losing their health insurance. The role of one alleged factor – suicide – is less clear. Some early evidence has suggested that suicides probably did not increase significantly in the United States last year. However, other data have shown that other health problems related to rising unemployment, such as drug overdoses, has become more widespread.
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What is clear is that the impact of these excess deaths, like those directly attributed to viral disease, has not been shared equally among the various racial and socioeconomic groups of Americans. According to the study, somewhere around 72% of these excess deaths involved Americans without a university degree, despite this group accounting for only 37% of all working-age Americans. Black Americans, men, and people over the age of 45 were also disproportionately more likely to die in their analysis.
It is difficult to separate the indirect effects of a natural disaster, especially one that occurred as long as the covid-19 pandemic had. Some people argued that aggressive measures to reduce the pandemic, which sometimes included closing down businesses such as bars and restaurants, were counterproductive, in part because of the potentially job losses. However, some countries, including New Zealand, have managed to completely stop the spread of the pandemic within their borders through these measures, allowing to recover strongly from recessions.
In any case, the USA did not do a good job either to stop the pandemic, with nearly half a million deaths directly attributed to covid-19, or at keeping Americans in financial trouble on a solid footing. Probably some of them deaths could have been prevented by a simply better policy – a lesson the authors hope we can learn in the second year of covid-19.
“A number of different programs and policies could help prevent unemployment-related deaths and their disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities,” lead author Ellicott Matthay, a postdoctoral researcher at the UCSF Center for Health and Community, told Gizmodo. “Some of the most prominent include: (1) more generous and extensive unemployment benefits, with broader eligibility criteria, (2) programs to promote early re-employment and (3) extended access to health insurance and mental health / substance use services, especially for those most affected. ”
This article has been updated with comments from the lead author of the study.