COVID-19 led to unprecedented decline in global life expectancy
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The COVID-19 pandemic reduced the world’s life expectancy by about 2 years, according to recent estimates published in Population and Development Review.
“Since 1950, annual declines of that magnitude had only been observed on rare occasions, such as Cambodia in the 1970s, Rwanda in the 1990s, and possibly some sub-Saharan African nations at the peak of the AIDS pandemic,” wrote Patrick Heuveline, a professor of sociology and the associate director of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA.
Life expectancy declined from 2019 to 2020 and again from 2020 to 2021 but appeared to stabilize by the end of 2021, according to Heuveline’s findings. His report is the latest attempt to quantify the impact that the pandemic has had on life expectancy.
Heuveline analyzed global and national estimates of changes in life expectancy using data on excess deaths as opposed to deaths attributed solely to COVID-19. While Heuveline primarily referenced the World Mortality Dataset, he altered his approach for determining the numbers of excess deaths per country depending on the availability and quality of data.
Global life expectancy
The analysis revealed that the increase in deaths during the pandemic had a substantial impact on global life expectancy, which had previously remained in uninterrupted growth from 1950 to 2019, according to Heuveline. The pandemic caused marked declines, by 0.92 years between 2019 and 2020 and by an additional 0.72 years between 2020 and 2021. Estimates indicate that the global life expectancy in 2021 dropped below that of 2013.
National life expectancy
Nationally, many countries experienced substantial changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2021, Heuveline reported. The U.S. experienced an annual change of just over 2 years of decline, while other countries experienced greater declines. For example, Peru experienced a decrease of about 7 years. Meanwhile, Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Mexico, Nicaragua and Paraguay experienced declines of about 4 to 6 years.
Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia experienced an annual decline of a little over 4 years compared with more than 3 years for Albania, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Poland, according to Heuveline. Egypt lost 2.3 years in life expectancy, India 2.6 years, Kazakhstan 3.2 years, Lebanon 3.4 years, Philippines 3 years and South Africa 3.1 years.
Countries that did not reach a 2-year decline in life expectancy included those in Eastern Asia, Australia, New Zealand and most of western Europe.
“The results demonstrate that the pandemic had an impact on the global life expectancy that has no precedent since 1950,” Heuveline wrote. “In more than half of the countries where impacts on national life expectancy could be estimated, they also appear to be of a rare magnitude since 1950.”
There is still much uncertainty regarding the exact declines in life expectancy nationally and globally, he added.
However, his estimates indicate the large mortality impact that the pandemic has had in the U.S. compared with other high-income countries in Western Europe, in Russia compared with the rest of Europe, and in some Central and South American nations.
“Each year since 1950, years of life lost to mortality reversals in some parts of the world had been more than compensated by years of life gained from declines in other causes of deaths or in other parts of the world,” Heuveline wrote. “For the first time in at least 70 years, this was not the case in 2020 and will not be the case in 2021 either.”
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