COVID-19 pandemic has caused the biggest decrease in life expectancy since World War II, study finds
University
of Oxford
More Americans have died from COVID than the 1918-9 "Spanish" Flu. There was NO vaccine for the flu at that time.
The
COVID-19 pandemic triggered life expectancy losses not seen since World War II
in Western Europe and exceeded those observed around the dissolution of the
Eastern Bloc in central and Eastern European countries, according to research
led by scientists at Oxford's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science.
The
research team assembled an unprecedented dataset on mortality from 29
countries, spanning most of Europe, the US and Chile -- countries for which
official death registrations for 2020 had been published. They found that 27 of
the 29 countries saw reductions in life expectancy in 2020, and at a scale
which wiped out years of progress on mortality, according to the paper
published today in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Women
in 15 countries and men in 10 countries were found to have a lower expectancy
at birth in 2020 than in 2015, a year in which life expectancy was already
negatively affected by a significant flu season.
According to the study's co-lead author Dr José Manuel Aburto, 'For Western European countries such as Spain, England and Wales, Italy, Belgium, among others, the last time such large magnitudes of declines in life expectancy at birth were observed in a single year was during WW-II.'
But,
he says, the scale of the life expectancy losses was stark across most
countries studied, '22 countries included in our study experienced larger
losses than half a year in 2020. Females in eight countries and males in 11
countries experienced losses larger than a year. To contextualize, it took on
average 5.6 years for these countries to achieve a one-year increase in life
expectancy recently: progress wiped out over the course of 2020 by COVID-19.'
Across
most of the 29 countries, males saw larger life expectancy declines than
females. The largest declines in life expectancy were observed among males in
the US, who saw a decline of 2.2 years relative to 2019 levels, followed by
Lithuanian males (1.7 years).
According
to co-lead author, Dr Ridhi Kashyap, 'The large declines in life expectancy
observed in the US can partly be explained by the notable increase in mortality
at working ages observed in 2020. In the US, increases in mortality in the
under 60 age group contributed most significantly to life expectancy declines,
whereas across most of Europe increases in mortality above age 60 contributed
more significantly.'
In
addition to these age patterns, the team's analysis reveals that most life
expectancy reductions across different countries were attributable to official
COVID-19 deaths.
Dr
Kashyap adds, 'While we know that there are several issues linked to the
counting of COVID-19 deaths, such as inadequate testing or misclassification,
the fact that our results highlight such a large impact that is directly
attributable to COVID-19 shows how devastating a shock it has been for many
countries. We urgently call for the publication and availability of more
disaggregated data from a wider-range of countries, including low- and
middle-income countries, to better understand the impacts of the pandemic
globally.'
Life
expectancy, also known as period life expectancy, refers to the average age to
which a newborn live if current death rates continued for their whole life. It
does not predict an actual lifespan. It provides a snapshot of current mortality
conditions and allows for a comparison of the size of the mortality impacts of
the pandemic between different countries and populations.
Note: Interactive
visualizations of the paper's main results/findings are available on this
website: https://covid19.demographicscience.ox.ac.uk/lifeexpectancy