“We interpret these results as a strong indication that policymakers should take into consideration the severe, long-run implications of such a large economic recession on people’s lives when deliberating on COVID-19 recovery and containment measures.”
Academics from Duke, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins have concluded that there could be around a million excess deaths over the next two decades as a result of lockdowns.
A NBER working paper titled The Long-Term Impact Of The Covid-19 Unemployment Shock On life Expectancy And Mortality Rates suggests that “For the overall population, the increase in the death rate following the COVID-19 pandemic implies a staggering 0.89 and 1.37 million excess deaths over the next 15 and 20 years, respectively.”
The paper was written by Francesco Bianchi, an economist at Duke University, Giada Bianchi, an MD in the Division of Hematology, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Harvard Medical School, and Dongho Song, an economist at the Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.
The study into how unemployment affects mortality and life expectancy was centred around 67 years of data about unemployment, life expectancy, and death rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The paper suggests that deaths caused by the economic and societal decline as a result of lockdowns may “far exceed those immediately related to the acute COVID-19 critical illness.”
