Corona pandemic: life expectancy has fallen in the EU

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Due to the Corona pandemic, life expectancy in the EU region fell by more than a year in 2021 compared to pre-crisis levels. This is the highest decline for most countries since World War II, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced in Paris on Monday. According to the report, life expectancy in 2021 was just over 80 years. The pandemic has strained health systems everywhere, it said.

As a result of the Corona pandemic, life expectancy in the EU region fell by more than a year in 2021 compared to pre-crisis levels. For most countries, this is the highest decline since World War II, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced in Paris on Monday. According to the report, life expectancy in 2021 was just over 80 years. The pandemic has strained health systems everywhere, it said.

Life expectancy lowered by Corona pandemic.
In this country, there was a comparatively large number of staff before the pandemic and, according to the OECD, also above-average hospital capacity, which benefited care during the crisis. As a result, the number of hip operations, for example, fell by ten percent in Austria in the first year of the pandemic, compared with an average decline of 14 percent in EU countries. However, the report shows that the number of knee surgeries fell by 21 percent, similar to the EU average of 24 percent.

For Austria, the data also shows that 41 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds experienced symptoms of depression during the pandemic – far higher than the overall adult group (24 percent). The proportion of overweight or obese children aged seven to 10 in Austria rose sharply from 20.7 percent in September 2019 to 26.2 percent in March 2021.

Corona drove up health spending
In almost all EU countries, Corona had increased health spending in 2020 and 2021. In Austria, per capita health spending increased by 1.7 percent in real terms in 2020 compared with the year before and by 10.1 percent in 2021. As a share of GDP, health spending climbed from 10.5 percent in 2019 to 11.5 percent in 2020 and 12.2 percent in 2021.

Corona had shed a clear light on the weaknesses in European healthcare systems, which in many places had been underfunded for years, he said. However, this was less true for Austria than for many other countries, the OECD stressed in a statement.