Has the pandemic sounded the death knell for seventy years of progression – which we thought was irreversible – in life expectancy? Maybe yes. Because, with nearly 7 million deaths in just under four years, according to figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), Covid-19 has largely contributed to reducing life expectancy around the world. . This is confirmed by a study published Monday March 11 in The Lancet.
According to the British magazine, the global mortality rate would have increased by 5.1% over the period of the pandemic, which runs from 2020 to 2021. And this even though it had continued to decrease since the 1950s. Indeed, between 1950 and 2021, global life expectancy at birth increased by 22.7 years, from 49 years to 71.7 years. However, over the two years of the health crisis, it declined by more than a year and a half, “thus reversing historical trends”, underlines the study.
A setback that concerns the whole world
And the atrophy observed by researchers is far from negligible: the decline in life expectancy would have affected 84% of the approximately 204 countries and territories examined, or almost all States. “Among adults around the world, the Covid pandemic has had an impact unparalleled in half a century, even taking into account wars and natural disasters,” underlined the main author of the study, Austin Schumacher, researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
Thus, between 2019 and 2021, the increase in life expectancy observed over the last seventy years was only confirmed in 32 states. Conversely, in almost all countries, infant mortality rates continued to decline, although more slowly than in previous years. Indeed, if we zoom in on the population aged under 5, in 2021, some 500,000 fewer deaths than in 2019 were recorded.
“Extraordinary progress,” rejoices a researcher at IHME, Hmwe Hmwe Kyu, who now considers the avoidance of a “next pandemic” as a priority as well as the reduction of “the great disparities from one country to another in health matters”.
What about the number of deaths directly linked to Covid-19?
It remains that the study published by The Lancet does not make it possible to clearly distinguish deaths directly linked to Covid from those caused by the consequences of the health restrictions put in place to contain the epidemic.
Indeed, researchers estimate the number of deaths in 2020 and 2021 at 131 million, of which 9 to 15 million would be linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. Figures which include both “deaths directly due to SARS-CoV-2 infection and those indirectly linked, because due to social, economic or behavioral changes associated with the pandemic”, specifies the report.
“We can think of difficulties in accessing care as well as greater social isolation which may have influenced differences in behavior and consumption,” explained Anne Fouillet, epidemiologist at Public Health France, to our colleagues at AFP, last December.
In France, nearly 130,000 people died from Covid-19 between 2020 and 2021, a year during which the pandemic was responsible for nearly 10% of deaths occurring in France.