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A Wisconsin researcher has taken on the grim task of looking at how many years, cumulatively, COVID-19 has cut from people's lives. The answer just for last year, and for the U.S. and 80 other countries with good health statistics, is more than 20 million years. The co-authors of the study came up with their lost life metric by subtracting the age of everyone who died of COVID-19 from the life expectancy in the dead person's country, taking gender into account. One of the authors is UW-Madison Political Science Professor Adeline Lo, who calls herself a political methodologist, using statistical tools to study social science questions. "I guess for some of us, who have been tracking the progression of the pandemic, the results are not surprising but sobering,” she says. Lo says while it's common to focus on the percentage of very old people who have died, in Wisconsin only 54% of people who have passed away from COVID-19 are age 80 and up — the lost years metric really comes into play