The 'shocking' impact of COVID-19: Americans, young and old, have lost 2.5 million years of life, Harvard researcher says

Stephen Elledge was upset.

A world-class molecular biologist and geneticist, Elledge felt like people were ignoring an important aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic. They kept talking about how the only people dying were old and would have died soon anyway.

So Elledge, a scientist to his bones, decided to run some numbers.

Elledge calculated life expectancy for more than 200,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19 and made two surprising findings: COVID-19 has cost Americans 2.5 million years of life – about as much as from six months of cancer...