Another remarkable finding from the new paper from CTUP fellow and University of Chicago professor Casey Mulligan is this:
During the first 15 months of the pandemic, men lost 4.5 million years of life to fatal drug alcohol overdoses and another 1.2 million life years to deaths by alcohol-induced causes.
(The life years metric counts each death according to the remaining years of life expectancy for people that age, and thus the number is larger for deaths among the young than deaths among the old).
By comparison, 4.0 million life years were lost by men for whom COVID-19 was the cause of death.
Drug and alcohol deaths were also significant for women, although not quite reaching COVID deaths in terms of life years.
We think it is clear that these deaths of despair were due to the isolation from lockdowns and huge government cash payments to Americans who were not working.