The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the largest drop in life expectancy last year since World War II, a document released Monday by the Oxford University, shows.
The study revealed that American men shed 2.2 years of life expectancy in 2020 because of the virus -- the biggest decrease among nearly 30 countries in an extensive examination of the disease's impact on longevity.
There have been almost 5 million deaths caused by COVID-19, with greater declines in life expectancy for men compared to women in most countries, a Reuters tally shows.
Life expectancy was down by more than six months compared with the previous year in 22 of the 29 nations evaluated in the research, which spanned the U.S., Europe and Chile. Overall, reductions in lifespans in 27 of the 29 nations were recorded.
Fatalities among working-age males contributed the most to decreasing life expectancies in the U.S., studies conducted by demographers at the UK's University of Oxford found.
Lifespan declines surpassed those tallied around the time of the collapse of the Eastern bloc in eastern and central Europe, researchers at Oxford's Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science indicated.
Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that lifespan for men in Britain had dropped for the first time in four decades because of COVID-19.
Based on its latest findings, a boy born between 2018 and 2020 is expected to live until he is almost 80 -- a decrease from 79.2 for the period of 2015 to 2017, the ONS said.
Only Norway and Denmark, who have been successful at keeping their outbreaks at bay, avoided declines in lifespans across both sexes, a document released by the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE) showed.
The study conducted by the University of Oxford is the first to use a large collection of data from 29 nations representing most of the U.S. Chile and Europe, to study the effect of the virus on lifespan last year, lead scientist Jose Manuel Aburto and his co-authors said.
Dr. Ridhi Kashyap, fellow lead author of the study published in IJE, appealed to more countries including low- and middle-income nations, to make mortality data available for further research.
