Story at a glance
- Life expectancy is an estimate for how long the average person might live.
- The coronavirus pandemic lowered life expectancy in most countries.
- Some countries seem to be recovering to pre-pandemic levels while others are still in decline.
A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour explores the changes to life expectancy (LE) during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
LE is an estimate for how long someone might live based on when and where they were born. Factors that contribute to bringing LE up or down include nutrition, access to health care, environmental factors like pollution and natural disasters and human factors like famine and war. In the context of the pandemic, changes in LE could result from the impact of the spread of the disease and resulting deaths.
In this study, researchers used data on deaths from 29 countries, including countries across Western and Eastern Europe, the U.S. and Chile from 2015 to 2021 to explore the impact of the pandemic on LE.
They found that LE dropped in 28 out of 29 countries, with Norway being the only one to exceed 2019 levels. Interestingly, eight countries saw LE bounce back in 2021 after seeing losses during the first year of the pandemic. These were Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, England and Wales, Italy and Slovenia.
Several countries experienced greater life expectancy deficits in 2021 than in 2020: Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. The authors believe this suggests the mortality burden got worse as the pandemic continued.
In the U.S., shifts in mortality rates from 2020 to 2021 varied for different age groups. In adults over 80 years old, mortality rates returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2021. For adults under 60, mortality increased from 2020 to 2021 and overall led to a seven-month decline in LE.
Overall, increased mortality in people over 60 years old was the biggest contributing factor for LE losses.
When considering coronavirus vaccines, higher uptake by October 2021 was associated with smaller declines in LE across all countries. Vaccine uptake was generally lower in Eastern European countries, which often had bigger declines in LE. In the U.S., vaccine uptake in the under 60 age group was comparable to countries like the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland, but the U.S. population saw greater declines in LE.
The authors state that speed of vaccine campaigns, effective public health measures and high baseline capacities of health systems might explain how some countries were able to maintain pre-pandemic LE.
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