New Data About the COVID-19 Pandemic Triggered Life Expectancy Losses

A new dataset on mortality from 29 countries, spanning most of Europe, the US, and Chile countries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 provides a better understanding of COVID-19 impact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused 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 a never-known dataset on mortality from 29 countries, spanning around most European countries to establish the life expectancy in 2020.

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The COVID-19 pandemic triggered life expectancy losses revealed its devastating effects.

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.

Based on the data, researchers found that 27 of the 29 countries saw reductions in life expectancy in 2020, and at a scale that wiped out years of progress on mortality.

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.

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The research findings are published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

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 WWII.

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To contextualize, it took on average 5.6 years for these countries to achieve a one-year increase in life expectancy and progress over the wiped-out life expectancy loss 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).

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The increase 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 researchers' analysis revealed that most life expectancy reductions across different countries were attributable to official COVID-19 deaths.

Apart from these findings, there are several issues linked to the counting of COVID-19 deaths, such as inadequate testing or mis-classification.

Such a large impact that is directly attributable to COVID-19 shows how devastating a shock it has been for many countries.

This study data urgently calls for the publication and availability of more dis-aggregated data from a wider range of countries, including low- and middle-income countries, to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic globally.

Source-Medindia