Life expectancy for people living in the EU has fallen owing to the pandemic, with the greatest decline in Spain.
The numbers are being brought down by Covid-19 fatalities as well as a lack of treatment available for other conditions because medical services have been diverted to the pandemic.
Spanish children born now can expect to live 1.6 years fewer than those born in 2019, according to Eurostat, the EU statistics agency. It defines life expectancy at birth as “the average number of years that a newborn child would live if subjected to current conditions throughout the rest of their life”.
Only children born in Finland and Denmark can expect to live longer than those born in 2020, with an increase of 0.1 years in life expectancy. And there was no fall for babies born in Latvia and Cyprus. In Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania the decline was more than a year.
Ireland has yet to report data, so no overall EU-wide figure was provided, but across the bloc in 2018 average life expectancy was estimated at 81 to 83.7 years for women and 78.2 years for men. In the UK the most recent figures, from 2018, put life expectancy at 81.26 years.
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Before the pandemic, the numbers had been consistently rising since the EU began putting a bloc-wide tally together in 2002. About two years were added every decade because of healthier lifestyles and better medical care.
Some experts said they expected the falls to continue for some time because of a backlog in essential care in the health systems as they struggle to cope with Covid-19 cases.
“The sharp falls in life expectancy, which in some cases are returning countries to their figures of ten years ago, show that people have died much earlier than expected” said Maciej Kucharczyk, secretary-general of AGE Platform Europe, a lobby group. “We need to invest in social infrastructures and services, including in universal health and quality long-term care.”
Tamsin Rose of Friends of Europe, a think tank, predicted “worse news to come”, adding: “The result of Covid is that huge amounts of care wasn’t delivered — cancers will be detected late. A tsunami of undelivered care for chronic diseases will hit hospitals the second the pandemic is deemed over.”