UK life expectancy drops amid pandemic

As reported by The BMJ, life expectancy in the UK sees a dip, attributed partly to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the latest data indicating a reduction of around half a year per person and levels now resembling those from 2010

Latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS)1 shows that life expectancy at birth in the UK in 2020-22 was 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females. Compared with 2017-19, life expectancy for males has fallen by 38 weeks from 79.3 years and for females by 23 weeks from 83 years.

ONS said that the decline was largely because of the pandemic, although it acknowledged that growth in the populations’ lifespan had only been improving slowly in the past decade. Life expectancy levels were now back to those last seen in 2010-12 for women and just below the 2010-12 levels for men, the agency said.

Pamela Cobb, joint lead of the ONS’s demographic analysis unit, said, “After a decade of slowing life expectancy improvements, we’ve now seen it fall for both men and women. This decrease has been mainly driven by the pandemic, which led to increased mortality in 2020 and 2021.

“However, a fall in life expectancy does not mean that a baby born in 2020 to 2022 will go on to live a shorter life. The average lifespan of a baby born today will be determined by changes in mortality across their lifetime.”

Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, said that he was unsurprised by the data. He told The BMJ, “The UK handled the pandemic poorly and we had a bigger fall in life expectancy during the first two years of the pandemic than any rich country except the US, so these figures are what we expected.”

It would take some time for the UK’s life expectancy to start improving, he added. “There will be post-covid recovery, but we need to start changing the things that led to the slowdown in the first place.

“We published a report earlier this week looking at deprivation and about half the excess deaths during the first year of the pandemic that you could attribute to it were linked to deprivation.”

Experts at health think tanks said the data underlined the effect that the pandemic had on the UK’s health and mortality.

Veena Raleigh, senior fellow at the King’s Fund, said, “Today’s data from ONS lays bare the impact that the pandemic has had on life expectancy in the UK. Although it has recovered somewhat since the sharp fall in 2020 when the pandemic struck, it’s not had the bounce back that might have been expected once the worst was over, pointing to deeper problems with the health of the nation and the resilience of the healthcare system.”

Nuffield Trust acting director of research Sarah Scobie said, “Improvements in life expectancy had already stalled before the pandemic. The reasons for this are debated, but likely to include historic improvements in health because of reductions in smoking in the population, alongside the impact of austerity, impacting more deprived populations the most.”

ONS has also published data3 showing that in 2022 the estimated population of England and Wales aged 90 years and over grew by 2.1% compared with 2021, to its highest ever total of 550 835.