Covid-19 has shortened human life expectancy by one and a half years, according to new study – Le Monde

People attend the burial of a family member who died of Covid-19 at Campo da Esperanca cemetery in the Taguatinga neighborhood of Brasilia, Brazil, on September 3, 2020. ERALDO PERES/AP

A year after the World Health Organization declared the highest level of alert for Covid-19, and as Sars-CoV-2 was still causing tens of thousands of cases a week, statisticians continued to assess the virus' impact on demographics.

Thus, according to a study published by the British scientific journal The Lancet on March 12, life expectancy worldwide fell by one and a half years (1.5 years) between 2019 and 2021. This corresponds to an excess mortality of 15.9 million deaths during the two years of the pandemic's acute phase.

Covid-19 has brought to a brutal halt the steady increase in life expectancy since the post-war period: Between 1950 and 2019, it had risen from 51.6 to 76 years for women and from 46.7 to 70.8 years for men. This impacted 84% of the 200 or so countries covered by the study, which notes that the youngest age groups were "minimally affected."

"For adults worldwide,the Covid-19 pandemic has had a more profound impact than any event seen in half a century, including conflicts and natural disasters," said Austin E. Schumacher, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington and one of the study's authors, in a press release. In his view, the decline in life expectancy attributable to the pandemic testifies to the "devastating potential impacts of novel pathogens."

It appears that the pandemic was "disproportionately severe" in countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. The study notes, however, that the correlation between a country's level of development and the severity of Covid-19 is not particularly strong. In plain English, this means that the new coronavirus was not automatically more deadly in poorer countries the authors cite the examples of Bhutan and the Solomon Islands.

On the other hand, countries such as Bolivia and South Africa suffered much higher mortality rates than nations at the same level of development. In the authors' view, these results show that vaccination, appropriate public policies and changes in individual behavior have had a positive impact, irrespective of a country's wealth.

The study also points out that infant mortality continued to decline during the pandemic, "albeit more slowly than in earlier years." In fact, 4.7 million children under the age of 5 died in 2021, compared with 5.2 million in 2019. While the trend remains on the right track, the researchers note that at this rate, 38 countries will not manage to get below the rate of 25 deaths per thousand live births by 2030, one of the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations. Regional disparities remain significant: Of all the children under 5 who died in 2021, half lived in sub-Saharan Africa and a quarter in South Asia.

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Covid-19 has shortened human life expectancy by one and a half years, according to new study - Le Monde