Covid Pandemic Caused Biggest Decrease In Life Expectancy Since World War II: Oxford Study

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the biggest decrease in life expectancy since World War II, and wiped out years of progress on mortality, according to a study published on Monday by the University of Oxford.

The research team assembled an unprecedented dataset on mortality from 29 countries, spanning most of Europe, the US and Chile -- countries for which official death registrations for 2020 had been published.

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The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found that 27 of the 29 countries saw reductions in life expectancy in 2020, and at a scale which wiped out years of progress on mortality.

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 a significant flu season.

"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 WW-II," said study's co-lead author Jose Manuel Aburto, from Oxford's Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science (LCDS).

"However, the scale of the life expectancy losses was stark across most countries studied, with 22 countries included in the study experiencing larger losses than half a year in 2020," Aburto said.

The researchers noted that females in eight countries and males in 11 countries experienced losses larger than a year.

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It took on average 5.6 years for these countries to achieve a one-year increase in life expectancy recently, while the progress was wiped out over the course of 2020 by Covid-19, they said.

Life expectancy, also known as period life expectancy, refers to the average age to which a newborn lives if current death rates continue for their whole life. It does not predict an actual lifespan.