Definitional inconsistencies and testing variations are just two of the reasons why we may never know the true death toll of COVID-19. Also, seeing as how we’re still in the throes of the pandemic, it would be impossible to quantify the long-term health and mortality effects, including long-COVID, delayed care for unrelated illnesses, widening inequalities, etc.
Still, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford (UK) have quantified and published the best snapshot yet of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global life expectancy.
In the first study of its scale, published in International Journal of Epidemiology, researchers found that 27 of the 29 countries studied—including most of Europe, the U.S. and Chile—saw reductions in life expectancy in 2020. The observations are based on an unprecedented dataset of the 29 countries that have published their official 2020 death registrations contextualized against trends from 2015 to 2019.
Life expectancy refers to the average age to which a newborn will live if current death rates continued for their entire life. It essentially provides a snapshot of current mortality conditions—and 2020 did not trend upward for anyone.
According to the study, from 2015 to 2019, all countries experienced increases in life expectancy at birth, albeit at varying degrees. On average, females were seeing up to +3 months, while males were seeing up to +5 months per year of additional life expectancy. That all changed in 2019 to 2020 when life expectancy declined for both sexes in all countries, with the exception of females in Finland and both sexes in Denmark and Norway.
The study data reveals that 22 countries experienced larger losses than half (0.5) a year in 2020. Females in 8 countries and males in 11 countries experienced losses of -1 year.
“To contextualize, it took on average 5.6 years for these countries to achieve a 1-year increase in life expectancy recently: progress wiped out over the course of 2020 by COVID-19,” said the study’s co-author, Oxford sociology researcher 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 World War II.”
Overall, 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 an unusual and significant flu season.
The largest declines in life expectancy were observed among males in the U.S., who saw a decline of 2.2 years relative to 2019 levels, followed by Lithuanian males at a loss of 1.7 years. Females in both the U.S. and Spain also experienced a loss of 1.5 years of life expectancy during 2020.
The decline in male life expectancy in the U.S. is somewhat of an outlier in that it can be attributed to a significant increase in mortality for those under 60 years of age.
“Despite having a younger population, the U.S. also has higher co-morbidities in these age groups compared with European populations with greater vulnerability to COVID-19,” the study authors explain. “Other factors, such as those linked to unevenness in healthcare access in the working age population and structural racism, may also help to explain the increased mortality.”
In contrast, overall mortality increased in almost all Eastern European countries can be traced to the 60- to 79-years-old age group. In Western European countries, such as Spain, Italy and Belgium, the largest increase in mortality came from the 80-years and older age group. In terms of sex, death rates at ages 80 years and older contributed most to life expectancy losses among females; while death rates at ages 60 to 79 contributed most to life expectancy losses for males.
The study authors say that while they were able to attribute most of the life expectancy reductions in the studied countries to official COVID-19 deaths, there are still holes to plug when it comes to the global map.
“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,” concludes co-author Ridhi Kashyap, associate professor of social demography at University of Oxford.