The rise in deaths caused by the COVID Pandemic led to a decline in life expectancy. More than two years in the US and one year in England and Wales were included in the research we did last year.
In a new study published in Nature Human Behavior, we have shown that life expectancy rebounded in most western European countries while eastern Europe and the US experienced additional losses. Only Norway beat its pre-pandemic life expectancy in 2021, and the rest of the world is worse off than it would have been without the swine flu.
We knew the outlook for 2021 was mixed, with the excitement of vaccine rollouts offset by huge numbers of infections caused by a series of new and highly transmissibleVariants.
The research team at the University of Oxford's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research gathered data from 29 mostly European countries.
We use life expectancy to show the mortality pattern of a country. It's calculated based on deaths from all causes so it doesn't depend on the accuracy of recording COVID deaths.
A baby's life expectancy isn't a prediction. It's the number of years someone could expect to live if they lived their entire life with the mortality rates of the current year.
It's a snapshot of current mortality conditions, if they weren't to improve or deteriorated.
Demographers use life expectancy as a summary measure of mortality because it is similar across countries.
It is possible for a large swing upwards or downwards to show that something has changed. We can compare mortality shocks across time and place with the large drops.
There was a lot of variation in the impact of the Pandemic on mortality between countries.
In 2020, life expectancy went down for almost all of the countries we studied. For some countries, life expectancy improved from 2020 to 2021, for others it deteriorated.
The region avoided some of the early COVID waves during 2020 and the large waves arrived in 2021. It took Bulgaria 3.5 years to lose 3.5 years since 2019.
After losing over two years in 2020, the US continued to differ from western Europe with an additional loss in 2021. The US had lower vaccine and booster take-up than western European peers.
Life expectancy in the US has been lagging behind European countries for a long time, so some of this US disadvantage may be related to underlying health vulnerabilities that were caused by the COVID Pandemic.
The US saw continued increases in deaths due to drug overdoses despite the fact that most of their life expectancy losses can be attributed to COVID deaths.
After a loss of almost a year in 2020, England and Wales gained 2.1 months in the next two years.
COVID derailed the trajectory of mortality improvements we would normally see.
The number of deaths shifted towards younger people in the year 2021.
Better vaccine coverage is likely to be the reason for this.
It was found that countries with better vaccine coverage for older people lived longer.
Mortality went back to pre-pandemic levels in the US. Life expectancy was worse in the year 2021.
Recent life expectancy declines are compared to historical crises which have resulted in deaths.
Since the second world war in western Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe, no losses have been recorded.
The flu epidemics of the past have seen rapid bounce backs of life expectancy levels. Covid's impact has been larger and more persistent than the common claim that it's just like the flu.
We weren't able to calculate life expectancy for all countries in the study because we didn't have the right data.
In 2020, Brazil and Mexico suffered large life expectancy losses, and it's likely that they will suffer additional losses in 2011.
We know the death toll in India has been substantial due to the data limitations.
Life expectancy recovery in the future is still not certain. Due to country differences, we expect continued divergence.
Delayed healthcare and strain on the health system remain to be seen.
The long-term impact of COVID immunity on the health of survivors is not known.
While we hope that mortality will return to pre-pandemic levels (and even start improving again), sustained excess deaths in England and elsewhere suggest we have not fully bounced back from the mortality impact of the Pandemic.
The University of Oxford has a Professor of Demography and Population Health and the University of Oxford has a Professor of Demography and Population Health.
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