The Impact of Covid-19 on Cohort Survival

Michel Guillot , University of Pennsylvania and INED
Néstor Aldea-Ramos, University of Paris 1 and INED
Nicholas Mark, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lawrence Wu, New York University

Studies assessing the impact of Covid-19 on mortality have almost exclusively adopted a period approach, which becomes problematic in the context of pandemics because of its reliance on synthetic cohorts. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of Covid-19 on indicators of cohort mortality. We focus on the Cross-Sectional Average Length of Life (CAL), an indicator that summarizes cohort survivorship in a given population. We assess the degree to which Covid-19 has offset or reversed pre-pandemic improvements in CAL by comparing pre- and post-Covid mortality conditions and using a causal cohort discontinuity design to obtain no-Covid counterfactual estimates. We apply this approach to data from 13 high-income countries in the Human Mortality Database (HMD). Results show that US stands out as being the only country among peers where Covid-related mortality increases were large enough to wipe out past progress in cohort survival.

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 Presented in Session 102. Flash Session Seasonal, Climate- and COVID-19-Related Mortality