How do you count the cost of a pandemic? Researchers are starting to tally the overall health impacts of COVID
that year, the burden was 16 times that of a typical influenza season, according to a preprint published last November.et al. Dtsch Arztebl Int.With the pandemic still raging across many parts of the world, it’s too early to calculate the full toll. But some researchers think it has helped to change how they calculate the health effects of diseases.
Currently, there is no standardized disability weight for COVID-19. Instead, researchers use the disability weights associated with other infectious diseases and similar health conditions. The data that go into DALYs come from a variety of sources. Many are routinely collected by national health authorities. For COVID-19, some data have been gathered through targeted surveillance efforts such as the REACT study , a massive sampling exercise that began in 2020 and has chronicled how SARS-CoV-2 is moving through England and what symptoms people are experiencing.Data from the REACT study suggest that COVID-19’s health effects can linger.
There is no guarantee that these data sources will stick around, however. The UK government announced in March that it would be stopping funding for some branches of the REACT study and for another surveillance effort.Early results on the health lost to COVID-19 are trickling in.