A new study published Thursday is among the first to attempt to measure deaths during the pandemic that were caused not by the virus itself, but by the economic devastation it caused. The study estimates that the spike in unemployment last spring contributed to an additional 30,000 deaths among working-age adults in the US in the past year.
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) looked at a variety of data sources to arrive at their figures, including government-collected unemployment and death rates reported in 2020. Last year there was the highest reported monthly unemployment rate: 14.7% in April 2020 – seen since the Great Depression. Then they mapped that data with previous estimates of how much a sudden rise in unemployment could contribute to additional deaths that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
According to their calculations, the fall in spring jobs due to the pandemic will lead to an additional death toll of 30,231 Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 between April 2020 and March 2021.
The team’s findings, published in the American Journal of Public Health, carry some insecurity. Using different assumptions about the risk of more deaths from unemployment, or relying on different measures of unemployment (for example, some measures include people who can work but are not currently looking for a job as unemployed, while others do not) changed their math . So in different scenarios, the unemployment-related deaths associated with the pandemic ranged from just 8,315 to as high as 201,968.
Since the study’s findings are based solely on modeling the expected death toll, it cannot show us exactly what may have caused these deaths. But job losses are known to contribute to poorer physical and mental health, often because people end up losing their health insurance as well. The role of one suspected factor – suicide – is less clear. Have some early evidence suggested that the number of suicides in the US probably did not increase significantly last year. Still other data has shown that other health problems may be linked to unemployment peaks, such as drug overdose, was more common.
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What is clear is that the impact of these additional deaths, like those directly attributed to the viral disease, was not evenly distributed among different racial and socio-economic groups of Americans. According to the study, about 72% of these additional deaths involved Americans with no college degrees, despite this group representing only 37% of working-age Americans. Black Americans, men, and people over the age of 45 were also disproportionately more likely to die in their analysis.
It is difficult to discern the indirect effects of a natural disaster, especially one that will persist as long as the Covid-19 pandemic continues. Some people have argued that aggressive measures to contain the pandemic, including sometimes closing businesses such as bars and restaurants, were counterproductive, in part because of the consequences of potential job losses. Still, some countries, including New Zealand, were able to completely stop the spread of the pandemic within their borders through these measures, allow rebound them strongly from their recessions.
At least the US. also did not do well to stop the pandemic, with nearly half a million deaths directly attributed to covid-19 or at Keeping Americans with financial difficulties on a solid foundation. It is likely that some of these deaths could have been prevented with simply better policies – a lesson the authors hope we can learn in the second year of Covid-19.
“A number of different programs and policies can help prevent unemployment-related deaths and their disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities,” lead author Ellicott Matthay, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Health and Community at UCSF, told Gizmodo in an email. Some of the most prominent are: (1) more generous and comprehensive unemployment benefits with broader eligibility criteria, (2) programs to promote rapid re-entry after job loss, and (3) comprehensive access to health insurance and mental health / resource use services, especially for those most affected. “
This article has been updated with comments from the study’s lead author.