The strange relationship between the Social Security system and the one-and-three-quarter million people dying from the pandemic.

I'm David Brancaccio. We've often explored the perverse fact that disasters can contribute to economic growth, even as they destroy security and well-being.

Well, today, a new study that finds the horrors of COVID led to the early deaths of so many people

that the Social Security system got a bit stronger.

The National Bureau of Economic Research details how the Social Security account added $205 billion,

because this is so grim, so many people died who would have normally gotten checks.

Marketplaces Daniel Ackerman has details.

The early days of the COVID pandemic were really scary, and for good reason, says Hanke Hain Johnson at the University of Southern California.

So we had a lot of excess deaths. There were 1.7 million

access deaths during the pandemic. Heyo and Johnson co-authored the study, and she says many of those

deaths were people who were older than 65. And were drawing retirement benefits or we're going

to draw retirement benefits, and they had already paid into the system. They paid in, but

stopped collecting when they died,

and those uncollected funds added up.

Gopi Shah Goda is with the Brookings Institution,

and she says this isn't the first time a public health crisis

has left an economic mark on the social safety net.

There is actually an old study about how smoking affects social security, increased rates of smoking

reduce the cost to the program because there are premature deaths associated with smoking.

While the COVID study looked specifically at excess deaths, the pandemic impacted Social Security in other ways, too.

Goeta says many people with long COVID drop out of the workforce.

The labor force participation rate directly influences the payroll taxes that are going

...