The pandemic has torpedoed life expectancy around the world, study finds

New research this week puts the enormous loss of human life caused by the covid-19 pandemic in a broader context. The study of 29 countries in Europe and North and South America found that almost all saw a reduction in life expectancy in the past year, while some countries recorded the largest declines since the Second World War.

Life expectancy at birth is a commonly used measure of a country’s overall health. It estimates how long an average person born in a given year (2020, for example) is expected to survive, given current trends in mortality among different age groups. Over time, life expectancy has trended upward in many countries, with more people living longer into old age. But when annual deaths increase significantly for some reason, especially when those deaths are in younger people, life expectancy can decrease. In the United States, for example, life expectancy was a little lower in recent years largely due to drug overdoses.

Researchers from the UK and Denmark attempted to quantify the impact of the pandemic last year on the life expectancy of 29 countries, using mortality figures from 2015 to 2020. These countries included the United States, Chile and most of Europe. The results were published Monday in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Overall, life expectancy fell from 2019 to 2020 in 27 out of 29 countries, and 22 countries saw a decline of more than six months. Many countries experienced a loss that effectively wiped out five years of progress, with women in 15 countries and men in 10 countries having lower life expectancies than in 2015. Some, including the United States, has also experienced a year-over-year decline unprecedented since other major calamities such as the end of the Soviet Union or World War II.

“For Western European countries such as Spain, England and Wales, Italy, Belgium, among others, the last time such large drops in life expectancy at birth were seen in just one year, that was during WWII, ”said co-lead author José. Manuel Aburto, population health researcher at the University of Oxford, in a declaration by the university.

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Most of this loss in life expectancy has been attributed to official deaths from covid-19, as well as deaths among those over 60, who are most vulnerable to death from the viral disease. But some places, including the United States, have been hit hardest by the deaths among the youngest.

“The sharp declines in life expectancy observed in the United States can in part be explained by the notable increase in working-age mortality observed in 2020,” said Ridhi Kashyap, study author and researcher. in Oxford, in the same press release. “In the United States, the increase in mortality in the under-60 age group was the most significant contributor to the decline in life expectancy, while in most European countries, the ‘increased mortality above age 60 contributed more significantly. “

Although older people are more likely to develop serious illness, many die before they are normally expected, and the loss of younger people has also been added. A study valued that 9 million years of life were lost due to the pandemic in the United States alone, in March 2021 (since then another deadly wave of the pandemic has occurred).

Covid-19 vaccines have undoubtedly saved many lives since their debut at the end of last year and will continue to do so in the future. But much of the world is still poorly vaccinated, and the United States is on the right track to lose more people to the pandemic in 2021 than last year. Thus, the effects of covid-19 on our life expectancy will remain substantial for the foreseeable future.