Life expectancy gains reversed during COVID-19

Nuffield Fellows José Manuel Aburto, Melinda Mills and Ridhi Kashyap, Associate Members Charles Rahal and Jennifer Beam Dowd and coauthors find that life expectancy at birth has declined in 24 out of 26 countries from 2019 to 2020.

In some countries (eleven for males and seven for females) life expectancy reduced by more than a year, and the biggest losses were for men in the US and Bulgaria.

(José Manuel Aburto, et al. and Charles Rahal, Melinda Mills, Jennifer B Dowd and Ridhi Kashyap, ‘Quantifying impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through life expectancy losses’. Published as a preprint on medRxiv, doi:10.1101/2021.03.02.21252772.)