The Overseas Situation Report Friday 22 October 2021
by Mike Evans
“No one’s life should be rooted in fear. We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.”
― Dean R. Koontz
No one is sure how the effects of Covid 19 will impact individuals as time moves forward.
However, one study which was published recently by the University of Oxford has shown that the covid pandemic has caused the biggest decrease in life expectancy since WorldWar II, and wiped out years of progress on mortality, according to a study published on Monday by the University of Oxford.
The research team assembled an unprecedented dataset on mortality from 29 countries, spanning most of Europe, the US and Chile — countries for which official death registrations for 2020 had been published. The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found that 27 of the 29 countries saw reductions in life expectancy in 2020, and at a scale which wiped out years of progress on mortality.
Women in 15 countries and men in 10 countries were found to have a lower expectancy at birth in 2020 than in 2015, a year in which life expectancy was already negatively affected by a significant flu season.
“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.
The researchers noted that females in eight countries and males in 11 countries experienced losses larger than a year. It took on average 5.6 years for these countries to achieve a one-year increase in life expectancy recently, while the progress was wiped out over the course of 2020 by Covid-19, they said.
Life expectancy, also known as period life expectancy, refers to the average age to which a newborn lives if current death rates continue for their whole life. It does not predict an actual lifespan.
Across most of the 29 countries, males saw larger life expectancy declines than females, according to the researchers. 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), they said. “The large declines in life expectancy observed in the US can partly be explained by the notable increase in mortality at working ages observed in 2020,” said study co-lead author, Ridhi Kashyap from LCDS.
“In the US, increases in mortality in the under 60 age group contributed most significantly to life expectancy declines, whereas across most of Europe increases in mortality above age 60 contributed more significantly,” Kashyap said.
American men lost 2.2 years of life expectancy last year because of Covid-19, the biggest decline among 29 nations in a study of the pandemic’s impact on longevity. Deaths among working-age men contributed the most to declining lifespans in the US, according to research led by demographers at the U.K.’s University of Oxford. Only Denmark and Norway, who have excelled at controlling their outbreaks, avoided drops in life expectancy across both sexes, according to the study.
Before the pandemic, life expectancy at birth had continuously increased in most countries for generations. Covid-19, though, “triggered a global mortality crisis,” the magnitude of which hasn’t been witnessed since World War II in Western Europe or the breakup of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the researchers said.
The biggest declines in life expectancy, a loss of 1.5 years or more at birth in 2020, were documented among males in the US, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Poland, and females in the US and Spain. Females from 15 of the 29 countries studied and males from 10 ended up with lower life expectancy at birth last year. Life-expectancy losses were larger for males in every country except Spain, Slovenia, Estonia and Northern Ireland.
The team’s analysis also shows that most life expectancy reductions across different countries were attributable to official Covid-19 deaths. “Emerging evidence from low-and middle-income countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, that have been devastated by the pandemic suggests that life-expectancy losses may be even larger in these populations,” they said, noting that losses in life expectancy are also likely to vary between subgroups within countries.
“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. “We urgently call for the publication and availability of more disaggregated data from a wider-range of countries, including low- and middle-income countries, to better understand the impacts of the pandemic globally,” she added. The researchers cautioned against viewing Covid-19 as “a transient shock to life expectancy.”
There is evidence of potential lingering harm from long-Covid and delayed care for other illnesses, compounded by the health effects of widening inequality from the pandemic’s social and economic disruption.
Meanwhile across the world the rate of infection has steadied although Europe has seen a big increase in the past week especially from the UK, Russia, Romania and the Ukraine. The concern is that as the weather cools and winter looms the rate of infections will rise as it is doing in some of the cold weather states in the USA.
Alaska is leading the low-temperature states with an increase in the number of infections, with 123 new cases per 100,000 residents on a seven-day rolling average. Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and North Dakota also are seeing a rise in infections as the weather cools, reducing opportunities to socialize outdoors and limiting physical distancing.
States in the northeastern region of the country also have experienced an increase in infection numbers over the past seven days. New Hampshire, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have recorded increases in infections, according to Post data. The data mirrors trends of last fall and winter when new-case numbers diminished in Southern states that were hit hard by the virus before it devastated colder-weather states.
Overall, new daily reported infection numbers fell by more than 6 percent in the past week along with the number of covid-related hospitalizations, which dropped by nearly 9 percent.
As the temperatures begin to drop in Northern Europe and the aged become ill with flu and other ailments many countries will start to see their health services being stretched to breaking point once again. For many of these countries their vaccination figures are well below many of the other nations and this is causing more people to be hospitalised than previously.
How this pans out we will have to wait and see, but in the meantime Stay Safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 243,325,034
Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,946,375
Total Recovered Worldwide – 220,503,932
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 17,874,727 (7.3 % of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 225,450,307
https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/
Information and Resources:
https://www.business-standard.com/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/19/covid-delta-variant-live-updates/