Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy at birth in Asia

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy at birth (e₀) for 51 Asian countries and territories from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021.

Method: Based on age-sex-specific mortality used for estimating the changes in e₀ for years 2019, 2020, and 2021 from the 2022 revision of the World Population Prospects, we employed Arriaga's discrete method to decompose changes in e₀ into both absolute and relative contributions of changes in age-specific death rate, and further obtained the age-sex-specific contribution to changes in e₀ by country/territory and period (i.e., 2019-2020 and 2020-2021) for Asia.

Findings: The COVID-19 pandemic reduced 1.66 years in e₀ of the Asian population from 2019 to 2021, slightly lower than the world average of 1.74 years. South Asia had a high loss of 3.01 years, whereas Eastern Asia had almost no changes. Oman, Lebanon, India, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, and the Philippines experienced a high loss of above 2.5 years in e₀. Despite significant national and territorial variations, the decline of e₀ in Asia was mostly from the age group of 60-79 years, followed by age groups of 80 + and 45-59 years; and age groups of children contributed little (i.e., 0-4 and 5-14 years old). Males suffered more losses than females in this pandemic. Asian nations saw less loss in e₀ in the second year of the pandemic, i.e., 2020-2021, than in the first year, i.e., 2019-2020, but this recovery trend was not observed in Southern Asia and South-Eastern Asia. Countries from Central Asia and Western Asia, such as Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, and Oman, had extraordinarily more losses in e₀ in the first year at ages around 70.

Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic had significantly affected e₀ of Asian populations, and most contribution to the reduction of e₀ came from the three older age groups, 60-79 years, 80 + years, and 45-59 years, with great variations across countries/territories. Our findings could have important implications for development of more resilient public health systems in Asian societies with better policy interventions for vulnerable demographic groups.

Keywords: Asia; COVID-19 pandemic; Decomposing life expectancy; Excess deaths; Life expectancy at birth.

Fig. 1

Life expectancy at birth for the world, regions, and the subregions of Asia, both sexes combined, 2019 and 2021

Fig. 2

Contributed years to changes in life expectancy at birth (e₀) by age group and sex for Asian country/territory classified by subregion, 2019–2021

Fig. 3

Contributed years to changes in life expectancy at birth (e₀) by age group, sex, region, and period (2019–2020, 2020–2021, and 2019–2021)