Global life expectancy — the average number of years a person can expect to live from their time of birth — dropped by 1.6 years at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, new research shows.
Global life expectancy had been on the rise until the pandemic struck, jumping from 49 years in 1950 to more than 73 years in 2019, according to the new study, published Tuesday (March 12) in the journal The Lancet. But between 2019 and 2021, this historical trend was reversed. This time frame captures the first two years of the pandemic, in which death rates peaked.
