COVID was worse for men, COVID Policy was WAY worse for men

Exploring life years lost in 2020

Was curious to continue the previous path of looking at age & then thought there might be something interesting in looking at sex as well in terms of the covid & all cause deaths. Not that many data sets that I have found include both, so I have done a bit of stitching for this analysis.

Data Analyzed:

1. Provisional COVID-19 Deaths by Sex and Age from the CDC includes COVID and All Deaths by month for 2020 & 2021 by sex and age bracket.

2. AH Deaths by Week, Sex, and Age for 2018-2020 from the CDC includes All Deaths by week for 2018-2020 by sex and (different) age bracket. Luckily, the age bracket used in this set was a further refinement of the ones used above, so I simply aggregated up to match the ones from the 1st data set. *Note that both of these have 2020 data, I used the 1st source as it has been updated more recently.

3. Life expectancy by age and sex . This is an actuarial table produced by the social security administration. I will use this to calculate life years lost.

Calculations, etc.

• I realize there are more sophisticated ways to calculate “excess death”, but given the data above, I will use a very simple method. Namely, for each age group and sex, I take the deaths in 2020 and compare that to the average deaths in 2018 & 2019.

• “Life Years Lost” will be calculated by taking the expected remaining life years for the median age for a particular sex & age group. For example, for a female age group 45-54, I look up female age 50 in the actuarial table and see an expected 33.5 remaining life years. Therefore, each death in the female 45-54 group would assume 33.5 life years lost. For the 85+ group, I simply used the expected life years remaining for 85 year olds. This would tend to overestimate the life years lost in this group.

• Data source (1) above has COVID deaths, so I can calculate what fraction of the total and/or excess deaths is attributed to COVID.

The summarized data looks as follows:

Some observations:

• The very young (<=4 years old) and the 5-14 females actually had less deaths in 2020 than preceding 2 year average. Not sure I’ve seen an explanation on this. Obviously COVID would not directly impact these groups much. Perhaps less driving, less swimming, less flu led to low deaths? Unsure

• For all groups 15 years old, we see significant excess death. As has been shown by others, for the younger groups, relatively small numbers of those can be called COVID deaths.

• For every age group > 5 years old, men have more excess death than woman & for all of the groups <64 years old, less of the male deaths can be attributed directly to COVID.

Aggregating the data for all age groups >5 years old, we have the following:

Here we see that while 6% more men died in 18/19, that number jumps to 10% in 2020. Excess deaths among men were 31% higher than women in 2020, with COVID deaths being 19% higher. Because the number were more skewed among the lower ages, COVID deaths resulted in 25% more life years lost to men & in terms of overall life years lost in 2020 due to excess deaths, men had an astounding 49% more life years lost.

Coming back to the title of my post. I offer that we can attribute a portion of the life years lost in 2020 to COVID (the disease) and the other life years lost can arguably attributed to the resulting policies (lockdowns & other restrictions) which perhaps led to other bad health outcomes (suicide, overdose, depression, obesity, missing non-covid healthcare). If you accept that premise, than it’s clear that COVID the disease was much worse for men (25% worse), but the resulting policies and actions were catastrophically bad for men.