Preliminary Estimates of Years of Life Lost (YLL) Due to COVID-19 in India
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Abstract
Objectives
More than 7 million cases of COVID have been detected in India by the middle of October 2020 and more than 100 thousand deaths have occurred. In this communication, we present an estimate of the years of life lost (YLL) due to COVID-19 so far and the projection for the full year so that the health damage by this new disease can be compared with some other ailments.
Design
Records based study
Method
The YLL by one premature death is the expectation of life at that age. To calculate YLL, the age-wise distribution of COVID cases and deaths was obtained from the official sources of the government of India. Similar calculations were done for the general population from all causes for comparison.
Results
A total of more than 2 million years of life have already lost due to COVID-19 and the pattern indicates that we may end up with nearly 4 million YLL due to this disease in India. This is nearly 20 years lost per COVID death, 303 years lost per 1000 cases of COVID, and about 3 years lost per 1000 population in a full year. The age-group 50–59 years has been particularly affected. Other important findings are summarized as key messages.
Conclusion
The years of life lost so far and anticipated in full-year are enormous but may still be lower compared with some other causes such as road injuries.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.24.20218693: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: Our estimates are based on reported cases and deaths. Questions are sometimes raised about their undercount. Even if they are undercount, the YLL per death and YLL per 1000 cases may still be nearly correct unless the unreported cases and deaths belong to a specific (say younger) age. This is not likely to be so because any …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.24.20218693: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: Our estimates are based on reported cases and deaths. Questions are sometimes raised about their undercount. Even if they are undercount, the YLL per death and YLL per 1000 cases may still be nearly correct unless the unreported cases and deaths belong to a specific (say younger) age. This is not likely to be so because any undercount will be for all age-groups. Nonetheless, more comprehensive, and standardized updated data are needed for more accurate calculation. Second, our estimates are based on national life expectancy. They lack international comparability but are more realistic in Indian context. Third, it can be argued that factors such as comorbidities should be considered, particularly because COVID is believed to be more fatal for people with comorbidities. Such ‘displaced mortality’ could result in lower YLL than our estimate. Fourth, in the absence of the data on the expectation of life in the year 2020, we have use this and other information for the latest year with available data, which is about two years old. These values may not have changed during this short period of two years.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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