On Mar. 11, 2024, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) released all-cause mortality, life expectancy, and population results from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease study (GBD). The findings uncovered a significant shift in global life expectancy. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is estimated that life expectancy declined by 1.6 years worldwide.

A new study published in The Lancet reveals never-before-seen details about staggeringly high mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic within and across countries. Places such as Mexico City, Peru, and Bolivia had some of the largest drops in life expectancy from 2019 to 2021.

The research, which presents updated estimates from the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) 2021, provides the most comprehensive look at the pandemic’s toll on human health to date, indicating that global life expectancy dropped by 1.6 years from 2019 to 2021, a sharp reversal from past increases. Among GBD’s other key findings, child mortality continued to drop amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with half a million fewer deaths among children under 5 in 2021 compared to 2019. Mortality rates among children under 5 decreased by 7% from 2019 to 2021.

Researchers from IHME identified high mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in places that were previously less recognized and/or reported. For example, the study reveals that after accounting for the age of the population, countries such as Jordan and Nicaragua had high excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic that was not apparent in previous all-age excess mortality estimates. In analyzing subnational locations not previously investigated, the South African provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo had among the highest age-adjusted excess mortality rates and largest life expectancy declines during the pandemic in the world. Conversely, the places with some of the lowest age-adjusted excess mortality from the pandemic during this period included Barbados, New Zealand, and Antigua and Barbuda.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mortality among older people worldwide rose in ways unseen in the previous 70 years. While the pandemic was devastating, killing approximately 16 million people around the globe in 2020 and 2021 combined, it did not completely erase historic progress – life expectancy at birth rose by nearly 23 years between 1950 and 2021.

GBD 2021 analyzes past and current demographic trends at global, regional, national, and subnational levels. The study provides globally comparable measures of excess mortality and is one of the first studies to fully evaluate demographic trends in the context of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In estimating excess deaths due to the pandemic, the authors accounted for deaths from the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, as well as deaths associated with indirect effects of the pandemic, such as delays in seeking health care.

Employing innovative methods to measure mortality, excess mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy, and population, the study authors estimate that the pandemic caused global mortality to jump among people over age 15, rising by 22% for males and 17% for females from 2019 to 2021.