Medscape Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.
From March of 2020 to May of 2023, 1.38 million more people died in the United States than would have been expected — 1.38 million lives that, had circumstances been different, would not have been lost.
This is the legacy of the COVID pandemic. And I want to be clear that not all of these deaths are directly due to COVID; we’ll explore the deaths attributable to the virus in a minute. But the pandemic itself, the changes it wrought on society — the delayed cancer screenings, the missed outpatient appointments — all of these acted to change our fundamental understanding of the risk of living in this country.