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.
https://fortune.com/2025/02/19/americans-died-covid-social-security/
