COVID-19 pandemic causes devastating drop in life expectancy around the world, study finds

COVID-19 pandemic triggered significant increase in global mortality in 2020, says study published Sunday in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Women in 15 countries and men in 10 had “lower life expectancies at birth in 2020 than in 2015,” the researchers said.

Life expectancy, a measure used to examine the health and longevity of the population, refers to the average number of years a newborn baby could expect to live if they knew the death rates observed at the time of birth for all his life.

Life expectancy at birth declined from 2019 to 2020 in 27 of the 29 countries examined in the study, conducted by scientists at the University of Oxford. Men in the United States and Lithuania experienced the largest losses in life expectancy, at 2.2 years and 1.7 years respectively.

In July, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics also reported that life expectancy in the United States decreased by 1.5 years in 2020. This is the biggest drop since WWII, according to NPR.

“While we know that there are several issues with counting deaths from COVID-19, such as inadequate testing or misclassification, the fact that our results highlight such a large impact that is directly attributable to COVID -19 shows how devastating he is. has been for many countries, ”said Dr. Ridhi Kashyap, associate professor of social demography at Oxford and co-lead author of the study, in a declaration on Sunday.

Researchers from the UK and Denmark came to these conclusions by constructing sex life tables for 29 countries between 2015 and 2020.

Since last week, the COVID-19 pandemic killed as many Americans as the Spanish flu in 1918 – about 1 in 500 Americans. Unvaccinated people accounted for over 97% hospitalizations and deaths.

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