American men lost 2.2 years of life expectancy last year because of COVID-19 — the biggest decline among 29 nations in a study of the pandemic’s impact on longevity.
Deaths among working-age men contributed the most to declining lifespans in the U.S., according to research led by demographers at the U.K.’s University of Oxford. Only Denmark and Norway, who have excelled at controlling their outbreaks, avoided drops in life expectancy across both sexes, the study published Sunday in the International Journal of Epidemiology found.
Before the pandemic, life expectancy at birth had continuously increased in most countries for generations. COVID-19, though, "triggered a global mortality crisis,” the magnitude of which hasn’t been witnessed since World War II in Western Europe or the breakup of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the researchers said.