Abstract
In many countries of the world, COVID-19 pandemic has led to exceptional changes in mortality trends. Some studies have tried to quantify the effects of Covid-19 in terms of a reduction in life expectancy at birth in 2020. However, these estimates might need to be updated now that, in most countries, the mortality data for the whole year are available. We used data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) Short-Term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF) data series to estimate life expectancy in 2020 for several countries. The changes estimated using these data and the appropriate methodology seem to be more pessimistic than those that have been proposed so far: life expectancy dropped in the Russia by 2.16 years, 1.85 in USA, and 1.27 in England and Wales. The differences among countries are substantial: many countries (e.g. Denmark, Island, Norway, New Zealand, South Korea) saw a rather limited drop in life expectancy or have even seen an increase in life expectancy.
Highlights
The most striking effect of the COVID–19 pandemic is the number of deaths that most of the countries in the world have witnessed
Similar to other research work [4,5,6], we chose to focus on changes in life expectancy. This well– known measure, quantifies the expected number of years lived by an individual of a so-called “synthetic cohort”, which survival is entirely defined according to the rates of a single period [7]. Despite it refers to an hypothetical cohort, in modern times, period life expectancy is a useful indicator of mortality, available for past years, and independent from the population age structure
The data used for the analysis are taken from the Short-Term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF) data series for several countries [9] that have been generated by the Human Mortality Database
Summary
The most striking effect of the COVID–19 pandemic is the number of deaths that most of the countries in the world have witnessed. Similar to other research work [4,5,6], we chose to focus on changes in life expectancy This well– known measure, quantifies the expected number of years lived by an individual of a so-called “synthetic cohort”, which survival is entirely defined according to the rates of a single period [7]. Despite it refers to an hypothetical cohort, in modern times, period life expectancy is a useful indicator of mortality, available for past years, and independent from the population age structure. Note that life expectancy can be computed at different ages, but using life expectancy at birth (age 0) is the most common choice to summarize the mortality level of a population
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