According to data extracted from a study by the California Demographic Research Center (United States), it is noted that there was a two-year decrease in life expectancy worldwide during 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
This is the study Global and National Declines in Life Expectancy: An End-of-2021 Assessment, carried out by Patrick Heuveline, professor of sociology and associate director at the University of California in Los Angeles, United States, published in the scientific journal Population and Development Review.
According to this report, during the period between 1950 and 2019, the decreases in mortality were scarce and localized, the decrease from 2019 to 2020, estimated in this study at 0.92 years, was the first since 1950, when the United Nations carried out the first estimate of life expectancy in the world. This research was the first scientific article that analyzed the worldwide impact of Covid-19 on life expectancy. In this sense, during the 2020-2021 period, another decrease of 0.72 years was observed between 2020 and 2021, although according to the investigation, life expectancy stabilized at the end of 2021, the DPA news agency specified.
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“Still, global life expectancy was two years lower in 2021 than it should have been in the absence of Covid-19,” Heuveline noted. In this way, the research focuses on the effect of the coronavirus on life expectancy in countries where the disease received little attention.
Although the data still does not allow a reliable approximation in almost half of the world’s nations, estimates indicate that the impact of Covid-19 was greater in Asian and African countries such as Egypt, India, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, the Philippines, South Africa and Tunisia; and lower in Western European countries such as Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.
“These results highlight a geographic imbalance between the availability and quality of data on excess mortality and the impact of the pandemic,” Heuveline concluded.