As the U.S. approaches the fifth anniversary of the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic, new research finds so many Americans died from the virus that the nation’s Social Security trust fund will see a net increase of hundreds of billions of dollars as a result of retirement benefits that will not be paid out.
The working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that approximately 1.7 million excess deaths among Americans 25 and older occurred between 2020 and 2023 related to the pandemic. Premature deaths related to COVID mean Social Security will not make retirement payments to those individuals in the future, reducing payments by about $294 billion, the researchers found.
At the same time, some of that gain is offset by the lost tax revenue from those individuals, as well as increased survivor benefits to spouses and children of the deceased, resulting in an estimated $205 billion less in future outlays.
Many of the people who died were seniors older than 65 who were already drawing retirement benefits or would soon, and had paid into the system for many years. While most of the excess deaths were white Americans, Black and Hispanic populations saw the highest excess deaths per capita, as did those with lower educational attainment.
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Of course, while excess death is one measure of how COVID continues to impact Social Security, there are other ways that the study notes it does not account for—long COVID survivors, for example, are more likely to drop out of the workforce, which could lead to paying less into Social Security over time and possibly needing to tap the safety net’s disability benefits.
“Our analysis suggests a slight improvement in Social Security’s financial health due to excess deaths, driven primarily by the premature death of people who would have received retirement benefits,” the report reads.
The authors—including research scientists from the University of Southern California and an economist from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—note that the savings are “modest.” Social Security is expected to pay out $1.6 trillion in benefits this year, meaning $205 billion is a couple months’ worth of payments.
