picture: RNZ
The first two years of the Covid pandemic have reversed earlier successes in increasing life expectancy, except in a handful of countries – among them Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Global life expectancy fell by 1.6 years between 2019 and 2021, reversing a long-standing trend of improving life expectancy, according to the latest analysis of the Global Burden of Disease study, known as the largest and a comprehensive effort to quantify health loss across time and place.
Coordinated by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and published in The lancet on March 11, it tracked trends in excess mortality and life expectancy in and between more than 200 countries and territories.
But for seven of them – New Zealand, Taiwan, Mongolia, Japan, Iceland, Antigua and Barbuda and Barbados – the excess mortality ratio for all ages for 2020 and 2021 combined was negative. That means the locations had fewer deaths in the first two years of the pandemic than expected based on past trends.
“In 2020, 20 countries and territories had negative excess mortality, while in 2021 only New Zealand and Barbados had negative excess mortality.”
The best findings
“For adults around the world, the Covid pandemic has had a more profound impact than any event seen in half a century, including conflict and natural disasters,” lead author Dr. Austin Schumacher, assistant professor of health indicators at the institute, said in a statement.
The paper reported that the pandemic killed nearly 16 million people worldwide in 2020 and 2021, accounting for about 12 percent of all-cause deaths.
Between 1950 and 2021, global life expectancy at birth increased by 22.7 years, from 49 years to 71.7 years. But in the period between 2019 and 2021, it has decreased by 1.6 years.
During the same period, long-term trends of declining mortality were replaced by a significant increase in mortality in the over-15 age groups (22 percent for men and 17 percent for women).
However, under-5 mortality was largely unaffected by the pandemic and continued to decline (by 7 percent).
What is excess mortality?
Excess mortality attributable to the pandemic was defined as “the net difference between the number of deaths that occurred between 2020 and 2021 and the number of deaths that would have been expected during the same period based on previous mortality trends for any reason’.
In other words, the total number of deaths minus the number of expected deaths based on historical trends.
Globally comparable measures of excess mortality due to the pandemic show significant differences in the burden experienced by different countries and territories, the authors write.
New Zealand context
“These findings provide further evidence to support the effectiveness of the elimination strategy in minimizing pandemic mortality,” University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker told RNZ.
New Zealand was praised for its elimination strategy in the early stages of the pandemic. This kept Covid numbers low until vaccines became widely available.
New Zealand in 2020 and 2021 also had very little flu.
By the end of 2021, 90 percent of the eligible population was dually vaccinated.
It wasn’t until 2022, after the government relaxed its pandemic controls, that the country had its first major outbreak fueled by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
In 2022, deaths in New Zealand increased by 10.4 percent from the previous year – the largest annual increase since 1918 (after the flu pandemic).
There were two obvious factors behind the increase: the pandemic and the country’s aging population, according to Statistics New Zealand.
In total, nearly 6000 New Zealanders have died from Covid, according to the latest figures from Te Whatu Ora.
But compared to other nations, New Zealand is said to have gotten off lightly.
“[The paper] reinforces other evidence that New Zealand’s response has been extremely effective in minimizing deaths during the pandemic,” Baker said.
The country’s Covid death rate was still “among the lowest in the world”.
“But it’s a moment in time, so it’s limited in what it tells us about our current experience. We are still in an ongoing pandemic, mainly because the virus continues to change.
“We will have to wait at least another year for the next update, which will include the period when we were highly exposed to the virus.”
The findings are also reassuring about vaccine safety, he added. “So far, the highest number of Covid-19 vaccines was given in 2021, which was a year when excess mortality fell to low levels.”
What is missing
While the study highlighted the impact of Covid on global death rates, it did not address the impact of the debilitating, chronic symptoms that some people experience after a Covid infection.
About 7 percent of adults in the United States say they are currently experiencing prolonged Covid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The authors of a March briefing paper published by the Public Health Communication Center Aotearoa described Long Covid as a “major threat to individual health, public well-being and economic performance” and called on the government to take action to manage it.
“Long Covid is now where the pandemic is,” Baker said.
