A Harvard researcher added up the number of years that Americans who died from Covid-19 might have lived had they reached a typical life expectancy.

Every death represents years of potential life lost, years that might otherwise have been filled with rich memories of family, friends, productivity and joy — trips to the grocery store, late night conversations on the phone, tearful firsts with a newborn baby.

He tabulated the ages of Americans known to have died of Covid-19, and tallied the number of years they might have lived had they reached a typical life expectancy.

His calculations show that the coronavirus has claimed more than 2.5 million years of potential life in the United States since the start of 2020.

About 80 percent of the Americans who have died from the coronavirus were over 65.

But younger people are still vulnerable to the worst effects of the virus, which, when they prove lethal, can cleave several decades from a life span.

A new paper estimates that over 2.5 million years of potential life have been lost to Covid-19 in the United States.

of life lost.

The report comes just days after scientists published a high-profile and discredited declaration arguing that businesses and schools should be quickly opened and that people “who are not vulnerable” to the virus — presumably the young and healthy — should return to “life as normal” while older Americans remain cloistered from the coronavirus

Although older people account for most of the confirmed deaths related to the coronavirus, “that isn’t the only way to look at it,” Dr

Despite making up only one-fifth of the total recorded deaths related to Covid-19, people under 65 accounted for nearly 1.2 million years of potential life that had been lost to the virus

Older people made up the remaining 1.4 million years in Dr

Mahmud stressed the importance of not undervaluing the lives of older people simply because they might have fewer potential years left — a mind-set that can disadvantage older populations and minimize their disease burden

Several other researchers have published similar observations on the number of years of potential life eliminated by the pandemic

Elledge’s analysis also showed that men, who tend to fare worse against the coronavirus, had lost more potential years of life than women

(Some of these underlying conditions can also reduce life expectancy; Dr. Elledge noted that his analysis was unable to account for this, and that the number of life-years lost in certain cases might have been artificially inflated.)

Roughly one in 920 Black Americans has died from the coronavirus, compared with one in 1,840 white Americans, according to one analysis

Black Americans already have lower life expectancies than white Americans

Elledge’s analysis did not break down potential life-years lost by race and ethnicity, although he said he planned to investigate

Some of these calculations were tackled by another assessment, published in June, which focused on younger Americans who had died from the virus, and added up the number of years they might have lived had they reached age 65

The June analysis found that, at the time, younger Americans who identified as Black and Latino had lost roughly 94,000 years of life to the coronavirus