Economists projected that excess deaths resulting from the economic strain of the pandemic will amount to 900,000 over the next 15 years.
“We find that increases in unemployment are followed by statistically significant increases in death rates and declines in life-expectancy,” concluded researchers in a new paper circulated Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The researchers, who are economists at Harvard University, Duke University, and Johns Hopkins University, projected that the jump in unemployment during the pandemic will lead to roughly 890,000 to 1.37 million excess deaths over the next 15 years and 20 years, respectively. They added that black people will see the worst of the economic fallout, with a disproportionately higher mortality rate and the sharpest decrease in life expectancy 15 years from now, down 0.85%. Among white people, that drop is 0.58%.
“African-Americans experience larger unemployment shocks and the effects of these shocks on unemployment are more persistent,” they said. “The effects on life expectancy and death rates are more severe for African-Americans, overall.”
The authors made their projections based on life expectancy trends and death rates in non-pandemic times without exceptionally large shocks to the national unemployment rate. Taking into account the 2020 unemployment data through October, they concluded that the national mortality rate will jump by about 3% over the next 15 years, with a 0.50% drop in life expectancy over that period.
They added that their findings “might be a conservative projection,” given that the unemployment figures don’t reflect the number of people who have exited the labor force due to economic restrictions meant to curb the rise in cases and deaths due to COVID-19.
“Our results suggest that the toll of lives claimed by the [coronavirus pandemic] far exceeds those immediately related to the acute COVID-19 critical illness and that the recession caused by the pandemic can jeopardize population health for the next two decades,” they said.
The Labor Department reported last week that new applications for unemployment benefits are running at about four times the pre-pandemic rate.
To date, more than 20.6 million infections and nearly 352,000 coronavirus-related deaths have been confirmed in the United States.
