Method of Assessment of Years of Life Lost Due to COVID-19 Pandemic in Ukraine

Years of life lost are an important metric for assessing the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the number of deaths it causes. However, a key assumption of the standard YLL estimate is that a patient who died of COVID-19 could potentially live on average the same number of years as people of the same sex and age live on average in the entire area for which life tables are available, although it is known that people who die from COVID-19 often have at least one underlying medical condition. This study is concerned with the problem of calculation of years of life lost (YLL) taking into account the phenomenon of comorbidities. For each patient, the survival curve is modeled taking into account its accompanying pathologies based on tabular data from Hanlon et al. [2] by using the Gompertz distribution. The search for parameters for this distribution was carried out using the method of maximum likelihood. It has been found that even taking into account concomitant medical conditions, death from COVID-19 leads to substantial number of years of life lost: 12.4 for women and 10.5 for men for the period from pandemic start till 23th of February 2022. This is quite close to 14.6 for women and 12.4 for men that can be derived from standard national life tables. Moreover, the dynamics of YLL during the pandemic in Ukraine has been illustrated.