The COVID-19 pandemic is like a war, not just in terms of struggle but other similarities as well. A recent study found that the decrease in life expectancy of humans caused by the coronavirus pandemic is the biggest since World War II. This pandemic has ruined the years of progress made on decreasing human mortality, noted a study published on Monday by the University of Oxford.

Life expectancy, also known as period life expectancy, refers to the average age of a newborn based on the current death rates. It does not predict an actual lifespan.

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The study also found that the life expectancy of women in 15 countries and men in 10 countries during birth was recorded to be lower in 2020 than in 2015, a year in which the life expectancy was already negatively impacted due to a high rise in flue cases.

“For Western European countries such as Spain, England and Wales, Italy, Belgium, among others, the last time such large magnitudes of declines in life expectancy at birth were observed in a single year was during WW-II,” said study’s co-lead author Jose Manuel Aburto, from Oxford’s Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science (LCDS).

“However, the scale of the life expectancy losses was stark across most countries studied, with 22 countries included in the study experiencing larger losses than half a year in 2020,” Aburto said

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According to Aburto, these countries on average took 5.6 years to achieve a one-year increase in life expectancy recently and it involved years of work and policy changes that was all wiped out over the course of 2020 by COVID-19.

The study also noted that across most of the 29 countries that were studied, males saw larger life expectancy declines than females.

Out of the 29 nations, the largest declines in life expectancy were observed among males in the US, who saw a decline of 2.2 years relative to 2019 levels, followed by Lithuanian males (1.7 years), the researchers noted.

The team’s analysis also shows that most life expectancy reductions across different countries were attributable to official COVID-19 deaths.

“While we know that there are several issues linked to the counting of COVID-19 deaths, such as inadequate testing or misclassification, the fact that our results highlight such a large impact that is directly attributable to COVID-19 shows how devastating a shock it has been for many countries,” Kashyap said.

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The study under question assembled and studied an unprecedented dataset on mortality from 29 countries, spanning most of Europe, the US and Chile. 

The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found that 27 of the 29 countries saw reductions in life expectancy in 2020.