Peter Coy writes:
the number of people ages 25 through 44 who died from all causes in the United States in 2021 was 52 percent higher than the number who died in an average year from 2015 to 2019,
whereas among seniors the increase was only 9 percent.
An NBER Working Paper by Casey Mulligan and Robert Arnott calls the elevated death toll among younger Americans “a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency.” It asks whether young adults suffered “collateral damage” from policies such as lockdowns that were meant to protect older people. They write:
All of this suggests that large and sustained changes in living habits designed to avoid a single virus had not only “economic” opportunity costs, but also cost a shockingly large number of young lives.