Global life expectancy declined between 2019 and 2021 due to deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a new study.
The study published in The Lancet presents updates from the Global Burden of Disease Study and shows that global average life expectancy decreased by 1. 6 years between 2019 and 2021. The study began in the 1990s and is the first time a decline in life expectancy has been recorded. has been documented, as opposed to a stable overall increase.
“For adults around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a more profound effect than any other event observed in the latter part of a century, adding shocks and natural disasters,” says co-author Dr. Austin E. Schumacher, interim. Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study.
The researchers estimated that 15. 9 million people died from Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021 worldwide and would have survived without the pandemic. 5. 9 million of them were recorded in 2020 and just under 10 million in 2021.
However, the pandemic has not affected mortality in the same way around the world. Eighty countries recorded death rates above 150, compared to another 100,000 in the first year or more of the pandemic, with Peru having the highest rates in 2020 (413 compared to 100,000) and Bulgaria in 2021 (697. 5 people per 100,000).
“Life expectancy has declined in 84% of countries and territories during this pandemic, demonstrating the potentially devastating effects of new pathogens,” Schumacher said.
However, there is some clever news in the report. In some countries, life expectancy increased in the early years of the pandemic, between 2019 and 2021, in addition to Australia, New Zealand and China. All of those countries recorded a decline in the number of Covid-19 infections than many other parts of the world in this period, although the report does not suggest that this is a cause.
In addition, infant mortality continued to decline even during the pandemic: in 2021 there were one million fewer deaths among children under five than in 2019.
The study also looked at demographic trends around the world. Since 2021, 56 countries have noticed their population decline, but population expansion has continued to accumulate in many low-income countries. In many countries around the world, other people are also aging. average. In the two decades leading up to 2021, the number of people over the age of 65 grew faster than the number of Americans under the age of 15 in 188 countries and territories around the world.
“The slowdown in population expansion and population aging, as well as the concentration of long-term population expansion in poorer regions with poorer fitness outcomes, will create unprecedented social, economic, and political challenges, such as labor shortages in spaces where younger populations are shrinking and resources are dwindling. Scarcity in spaces where the length of the population continues to grow rapidly. These problems will require significant political thinking to be solved in the affected regions,” Schumacher added.