Quantifying impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Australian life expectancy

Global excess mortality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic1 can be clearly assessed from the perspective of years of life expectancy lost. The study by Aburto et al., on quantifying the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through life expectancy losses,2 presents changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 for 29 populations with high-quality data, ranging from losses of - 1.7 and -2.2 years for American females and males, respectively, to small increases of 0.1 and 0.2 years for females and males in Denmark and Norway, respectively. However Australia, with its relatively strict COVID-19 containment measures of international border closures and lockdowns, resulting in just 898 COVID-19-related deaths in 2020, was not included in the study. Now official data are available (based on year of registration of death),3,4 and we present the results for Australia, with a comparison with Denmark and the USA which were clearly strong and poor performers, respectively, in terms of changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020.