Pandemic leads to biggest drop in life expectancy since WW2

COVID has caused the biggest drop in life expectancy in Western Europe since the Second World War, according to analysis from Oxford University.

Coronavirus has ravaged the world, with nearly five million people dying after getting infected and this has had a huge impact on the calculations that underpin life expectancy.

Life expectancy is a term that reveals how long a newborn baby can expect to live if current death rates continue for their whole life, so it is not an actual predictor of lifespan but gives a snapshot of current mortality conditions.

Academics studied death figures from 29 countries, which included most of Europe as well as the US, and found life expectancy decreased in 27 of them.

Females in eight countries and males in 11 experienced losses in life expectancy of more than a year. Dr José Manuel Aburto, study author, said: “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 the Second World War.”

Covid’s impact in Eastern Europe was found to be more detrimental to life expectancy than the fall of the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union crumbled.

In England and Wales, the team calculated that boys born in 2020 now have a life expectancy 1.15 years less than if they were born in 2019, and the figure is 0.91 for girls.

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, at 1.7 years.