We have seen all segments of the population impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic with more than 600,000 American fatalities, but one group of Americans, those who are on Social Security benefits, seem to be hit as hard any other group when it comes to fatalities.
Deaths in the number of Social Security beneficiaries increased by 17 percent in 2020 compared to 2019. Deaths among Social Security beneficiaries are not uncommon because beneficiaries include mostly the elderly and disabled individuals, but a close to 20 percent increase in the number of deaths in just one year shows that COVID-19 remains a dangerous virus, especially for Social Security beneficiaries.
The Hill wrote a recent article about this trend and shared some startling statistics. Below is a portion of the story from The Hill. This portion of the story explains how vulnerable Social Security beneficiaries can be when it comes to COVID-19.
Double-digit percentage increases, year-over-year, were found for all beneficiary groups including retirees, spouses, widows, and the disabled.
SSA’s statistics almost certainly reflect the concentration of COVID-19 deaths among the populations the agency serves. The CDC’s death data, which includes all individuals and not just Social Security beneficiaries, indicates about 500,000 more deaths occurred in the United States in 2020 than in 2019. The CDC estimates that approximately 375,000 deaths in 2020 were due to COVID-19.
SSA’s death data offer federal researchers additional ways to study the effects of COVID-19 because it can be linked to all elements in SSA’s databases including benefit amounts, past earnings, race/ethnicity, and diagnosis codes for disabled beneficiaries. Federal researchers, who have access to the raw data, could potentially unlock death patterns in the data that would help policymakers understand the probable effects of COVID-19 on groups with different disabling conditions and socioeconomic status.
Federal researchers can examine even very narrow subpopulations with the extensive raw data available. To illustrate, the data released by SSA last week show a relatively small beneficiary group (Disabled Adult Children) had the highest percentage increase (26 percent) in the number of deaths from 2019 to 2020. It may be that these beneficiaries, who are adults that have been disabled since childhood, have specific disabling conditions or circumstances, such as residing in long-term care facilities, that make them especially vulnerable to COVID-19.
The rest of the story goes into detail about what can be done about the huge increase in the number of deaths of Social Security recipients. It should not be surprising that one way to limit severe illness and COVID-19 related deaths is to educate Social Security beneficiaries about the need to get vaccinated. Unfortunately sometimes Social Security beneficiaries get lost in the shuffle, but considering this disturbing trend, it is time to make sure beneficiaries are educated about the risks of COVID-19 based on their individual situation. According to the story in The Hill, the CDC recently provided new recommendations about vaccines for immunocompromised individuals and now there are recommendations that some people get a booster vaccination this fall and these are things that Social Security beneficiaries need to be educated about to reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths among Social Security beneficiaries.
