It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has been the longest-lasting and most acute concern for people in the 21st century. Because the pandemic, which is months away from turning 2 years old, still continues to die in many regions. This constant worry also negatively affects people’s expectations from life.
Average life expectancy has dropped drastically with the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study. So much so that the decline brought by the epidemic was very close to the decline brought by the Second World War.
Such a decline was last seen in the 1930s.
In the study, in which 29 countries from different regions participated, thousands of people who were divided into classes such as men and women were asked how long they expected to live. The numbers that were the answer to this question were increasing little by little every year until the COVID-19 pandemic. The reason for this was, of course, the positive developments in medical technologies every year. However, the epidemic that broke out suddenly in Wuhan and spread to the whole world within months caused a great decrease in this expectation.
As a co-author on the research team, Dr. José Manuel Aburto emphasized the seriousness of the decline, saying, “The last time such a large reduction in life expectancy for Western European countries such as Spain, England, Italy, Belgium was during the Second World War”.
According to findings published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, the biggest declines in life expectancy occurred in US men, at 2.2 years. The second largest decline was for Lithuanian men, down 1.7 years.
Dr. Aburto explained how the average progress in people’s life expectancy is spent in about 1 year: “Women in eight countries and men in 11 countries lost more than a year. It took an average of 5.6 years for these countries to achieve a one-year increase in life expectancy recently. During 2020, this progress was completely wiped out by COVID-19. ”
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