On Sept. 17, 2021, Oxfordﾒs Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science reported the COVID-19 pandemic triggered life expectancy losses not seen since World War II in Western Europe and exceeded those observed around the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc in central and Eastern European countries.

The research team assembled an unprecedented dataset on mortality from 29 countries, spanning most of Europe, the US and Chile ﾖ countries for which official death registrations for 2020 had been published. They found that 27 of the 29 countries saw reductions in life expectancy in 2020, and at a scale which wiped out years of progress on mortality, according to the paper published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.