Quantifying impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Australian life expectancy
Date
2022-10-13
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Abstract
Global excess mortality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic1 can be
clearly assessed from the perspective of years of life expectancy
lost.2 The study by Aburto et al., on quantifying the impacts of the
COVID-19 pandemic through life expectancy losses,2 presents
changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 for 29 populations with high-quality data, ranging from losses of 1.7 and
2.2 years for American females and males, respectively, to small
increases of 0.1 and 0.2 years for females and males in Denmark and
Norway, respectively. However Australia, with its relatively strict
COVID-19 containment measures of international border closures
and lockdowns, resulting in just 898 COVID-19-related deaths in
2020,3 was not included in the study. Now official data are available
(based on year of registration of death),3,4 and we present the results
for Australia, with a comparison with Denmark and the USA which
were clearly strong and poor performers, respectively, in terms of
changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020.2 Given the relatively high number of deaths registered in 2019 in Australia that had
occurred in earlier years, we used the average of 2017–19 to provide
a clearer comparison of the past trend with the deaths in 2020 (sensitivity analysis on the years-comparison selection is included in the
Supplementary data, available at IJE online).