Pifarré Arolas, HèctorAcosta, EnriqueLópez i Casasnovas, GuillemLo, AdelineNicodemo, CatiaRiffe, TimMyrskylä, Mikko2021-02-232021-02-232021Pifarré i Arolas H, Acosta E, López Casasnovas G, Lo A, Nicodemo C, Riffe T, Myrskylä M. Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 81 countries. Sci Rep. 2021 Feb 18;11:3504. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-83040-32045-2322http://hdl.handle.net/10230/46573Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 81 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. We find that over 20.5 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 globally. As of January 6, 2021, YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza; three quarters of the YLL result from deaths in ages below 75 and almost a third from deaths below 55; and men have lost 45% more life years than women. The results confirm the large mortality impact of COVID-19 among the elderly. They also call for heightened awareness in devising policies that protect vulnerable demographics losing the largest number of life-years.application/pdfengThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-83040-3EpidemiologyInfectious diseasesPublic healthinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess