Global life expectancy rose by 6.2 years over the period 1990 to 2021, despite declining between 2019 and 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, a research group at the University of Washington reports in The Lancet.
Covid-19 is listed as the second-most frequent cause of death in 2021 by the group, led by Simon Hay of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the university in Seattle.
The most common causes of death in the period 1990 to 2019 were in declining order: coronary heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and infections of the lower respiratory tract.
The pandemic changed this sequence, being the third cause in 2020 and rising to the second ahead of stroke in 2021. Its impact varied greatly by region, with life expectancy falling by just 0.4 years in East Asia, South-east Asia and Oceania, by as much as 3.6 years in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The study reveals a nuanced picture of global health, according to co-author Liane Ong. There had been huge successes in preventing death from diarrhoea and stroke, while the pandemic had had a strong negative effect, Ong said.
It covered 288 causes of death and took in more than 200 countries and regions, making use of 56,000 data sources.