How to wrap your head around 350,000 deaths

1. ON AVERAGE, EACH PERSON IN THE U.S. WHO HAS DIED FROM COVID-19 WAS DEPRIVED OF ABOUT 13 YEARS OF LIFE.

This estimate, computed by Harvard’s Stephen Elledge, compares the age at which people died from COVID-19 with how long they likely would have lived according to projections from the Social Security Administration.

The 13-year average includes both people who died not long before they would have been otherwise expected to and people who died much earlier than that. A lot of relatively young people lost a lot of time: People under the age of 65, Elledge estimates, account for 45 percent of the total unlived years.

“When people talk about deaths from COVID-19, they say, ‘Well, they were old. They were going to die anyway,’” Elledge told me. “But people don’t appreciate the fact that even if you’re 70 or 75, you may still have 10 to 15 years of life left. And they also don’t appreciate, with the deaths of younger people, that it’s a huge loss of life, sometimes 40 years.”