What % of U.S. lifespans were lost to covid?

Life expectancies dropped 3% from 2019 to 2021, but is that the ideal measure of covid's toll?

Life expectancy in the U.S. got hammered by covid and other bad things of the early 2020s (like fentanyl, homicides, and car crashes), dropping from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.4 in 2021, before rebounding to 78.4 in 2023.

The drop from 2019 to 2021 is about three percent.

But does that mean covid cost Americans approaching three percent of their lifespans?

If true, that would be a vast number. But I’ve now got a different methodology for estimating the true cost of covid, which I will explain later.

I got started on this topic when Tyler Cowen wrote:

A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. We also got a vaccine in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often “lockdowns” were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case. Most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.

Ehhh …

Paywall here.