Pandemic brings decline in UK life expectancy

Life expectancy in the UK has fallen following the Covid-19 pandemic, according to research by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

For those born between 2020 and 2022 life expectancy at birth was 78.6 years for men and 82.6 years for women; down by 38 weeks and 23 weeks respectively compared to 2017-19.

The agency said the figures signalled a return to 2010-2012 levels for women, with men slipping slightly below the 2010-2012 mark.

Commenting on the data, Pamela Cobb, a demography analyst at the ONS, said: “After a decade of slowing life expectancy improvements, we’ve now seen life expectancy fall for both men and women. This decrease has been mainly driven by the coronavirus pandemic, which led to increased mortality in 2020 and 2021.”

Mr Marmot told the British Medical Journal (BMJ): “There will be post-covid recovery, but we need to start changing the things that led to the slowdown in the first place. [UCL has] published a report 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.”

The UK is not alone in seeing numbers decline. According to the UN, world life expectancy for men and women fell from 72.8 years in 2019 to 71 years in 2021, the first drop since 1959 – when China’s “great famine”, a catastrophe that killed around 40m people, began.

In separate data, the agency reports the number of people aged 100 or over in England and Wales hit a record high in 2022. There were 15,120 centenarians in 2022, more than double the 2002 figure.