UK Life Expectancy in 2020 Was Still at 2010 Levels and Over 80, OECD Report Shows
A new report from the OECD has shown that the pandemic took life expectancy in the UK in 2020 back to 2010 levels. Life expectancy at birth dropped by one year from 81.4 to 80.4, a level last seen in 2009. In 2008 it was even lower at 79.8.
This has largely been reported as something shocking – “Pandemic wipes out decade of progress on improving life expectancy”, declares the Telegraph – but in fact what it really shows is how limited the impact of the pandemic has been.
Despite all the daily reports of deaths, the running total of over 165,000 Covid deaths, and the repeated lockdowns imposed to protect a health service ever on the brink of collapse, the country has experienced a mortality rate no worse than 2009. I don’t know about you, but I can remember 2009. I don’t recall any lockdowns and panicking, or coerced experimental medicine, or bodies piling up in the morgues. Yet it was a worse year for deaths than the great pandemic year of 2020. Let that sink in.
Why are we destroying people’s lives and livelihoods and dismantling our freedoms to avoid going back to 2009 levels of mortality? Are we that obsessed with extending life at all costs that we regard it as intolerable to return to mortality levels last seen around the time the current party of Government came to power?
The OECD analysis is in line with the analysis done in April by economist John Appleby writing in the BMJ. The chart below shows that age-standardised mortality in 2020 was lower than in 2008 and every year prior to it.
These are overall deaths, so include deaths due to the Government interventions, including missed medical care and deaths of distress and despair.
No doubt it is disappointing to see improvements in life expectancy set back by a decade, though the impact is unlikely to remain long term. But we have clearly lost all sense of perspective. UK life expectancy is still, despite the pandemic (and lockdowns) above 80 years old. Eighty. Is it really worth demolishing our freedoms and filling our lives with rules, restrictions and mandates over a disease that didn’t even manage to reduce average life expectancy below 80? That’s a question that answers itself.
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That’s the thing with politically constructed pandemics. They always disappoint.
Will Jones for PM please!
Not miserable now, news from Italian village just inland from Naples.
it’s a focus/hotspot of covid, according to the lady mayor.
https://www-ottopagine-it.translate.goog/av/attualita/273646/a-cervinara-115-positivi-lengua-il-virus-ha-colpito-tutti-attenzione-massima.shtml?_x_tr_sl=it&_x_tr_tl=en
115 ongoing cases, which they mostly only know about because they’re screening everyone. The numbers “Of the 115 people currently positive, [minus] 20 children / adolescents of non-vaccinable age and a dozen people who have not had the vaccination, all the rest are people who have completed the vaccination cycle with the second dose.” = 83 double vaxxed, one of whom keeps contracting covid, repeatedly.
but the good news for life-expectancy, sad news for an individual, is the 92 year old lady (with other pathologies) who just died with covid.
Seconded.
So the lockdowns worked!
Indeed
Lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, job destruction and mental health degradation do exactly what they say on the tin. “Destroy the joy of living and reduce lifespan expectancies…”
Said in irony I would presume?
It was a bit flippant but it is a strange argument against lockdowns to point out how low the mortality was when they were imposed.
Perfectly logical explanation, doctors stopped handing out pharma snake oil, because people avoided the medical authorities.
No, the propaganda did.
This “punch” was delivered at the beginning of this year when the figures became available.
The BBC buried it at the bottom of an article headlined “2020 Saw Mpst Excess Deaths Since World War Two”
The punch didn’t land then. Don’t think it will land now.
It was made to appear even more dramatic in the case of Sweden where it was said to be the worst year since 18whatever.
Forgetting to mention that Sweden avoided excess deaths in WW1 & 2.
All part of the vilification of Sweden’s lockdown policy.
Life expectancy?
Non-death expectancy, rather. What the covvizombies have isn’t life. What they are doing isn’t living.
Amen to that.
Trouble is, like zombies – at least those in Romero movies – they’re hell-bent on turning everybody else into the living dead.
Given that average age of dead Covids was, is and probably will remain 82+, this is hardly surprising.
Average age of death: 80.
Average age of covvideath:82.
Get covvie, live longer.
Car bumber slogan Annie?
This is hardly surprising given that Covid hits the old much harder than the young.
So you admit it then? Vaccinating the young is a dangerous scam, murder!
This doesn’t follow from the fact that the old are much more vulnerable and I suspect you know it.
Don’t deflect.
If you’re not vulnerable & the prophylaxis doesn’t prevent transmission, you don’t need the poison.
If your claim is the poison does prevent infection, then only the vulnerable need take it.
Indeed. Just goes to show that we only needed to shield a portion of society, the rest could have kept the country/economy running. Most of the devastation of the lockdowns could have been avoided.
Sounds good in theory but it is based on the idea that the vulnerable are easily separated from the rest. The vulnerable aren’t all conveniently parked in care homes.
Responsibility should rightly have been placed on the individual. Boris had no right to assume responsibility for the whole of society. Individuals should have had free choice to make their own decisions.
Those who were genuinely vulnerable probably would have self isolated. And some government financial assistance could have been provided. It certainly would have been much more cost effective than the furlough scheme.
All those now closed businesses could have been saved.
Jobs saved.
Reduced suicides.
The lockdown induced health crisis avoided
Education continuing.
The list is endless really. You get the point though right? Do you think the benefit was worth the cost, as you rightly point out the old are more vulnerable than the young?
You’re right, furlough is the key thing that demolished the case for lockdowns even on a cost-effectiveness basis!
But if the ultimate thing we’re trying to avoid is deaths, vast majority of which occur among the vulnerable portion, then those outside of care homes are mostly independent enough to make the decision to shield themselves.
We should have taken care of our elderly and helped them to shield, rather than needlessly ruin the lives of many people, including the young who are not significantly affected by Covid.
“Why are we destroying people’s lives and livelihoods and dismantling our freedoms to avoid going back to 2009 levels of mortality? Are we that obsessed with extending life at all costs that we regard it as intolerable to return to mortality levels last seen around the time the current party of Government came to power?”
Well, I have not seen much evidence that governments and other powerful institutions globally give two hoots about saving lives. It has always been about political and economic power, and furthering specific interests and agendas. The “saving lives” crap is just how it has been sold to the public.
It’s also the case that without the government measures the overall deaths from all causes in 2020 would probably have been lower than they were – the measures didn’t have any measurable impact on “Covid” deaths (well, apart from increasing them in March 2020 by sending loads of infected people back to nursing homes), but the measures undoutbtedly caused many more deaths as a direct and indirect result of the vicious lockdowns.
Plus of course the official narrative is that life expectancy should see a constant increase, with no recognition that there is realistically a ceiling, and that it’s going to fluctuate over time for many reasons.
If I remember correctly the average age of death in the USA was already declining since an all time high a few years ago; because diabetes among other lifestyle enhanced disorders.
The main point of the plandemic was and is to reduce average life expectancy.
All restrictions, PIs, NPIs etc. had that effect.
And only they are the way to do so without being blamed for it and with the plebs lining up, clapping and voting for it.
This is just the start.
The goal is to turn humans into productive, and profitable for the MIC, junkies until they turn 65 and die off.
Pension time bomb defused and eliminated, government debt time bomb ditto, financial sector saved.
It might explain why investigation into raising healthspan (and thus lifespan) seems to be curtailed and regulated away
Steam reduction: – “shows how limited the impact of the pandemic has been” Not possible for a nothing to have an impact. Massively lethal impact of governments’ actions is showing; soon more so. ‘Life expectancy’ is absurd – Humans cannot see into future – no knowing when own close of play will be. Dear soft-in-the-micro head, now ex-head – the more your more, more greed, the weaker you extra-terrestrials make yourselves. Your mantra: ‘life does not exist’ only applies to extra-terrestrials who merely exist because too scared of life to live. If you’re scared of dying, don’t get born or live at all – stay locked inside your skin. If you want more, more you can have more, more provided you do not destroy my quality of life. Due to inverse proportionality between quantity and quality, only thing there’s more of is rubbish. I prefer quality of life to more quantity, and I’m not only one – we live, we do not merely exist. We need to be free to be safe. Extra-terrestrials’ total absence of life renders them devoid of inhibition on killing and murdering. It’s not life that needs locking up and culling, it’s their extreme fear, thus hatred of… Read more »
…err, right oh.
I know – ran out of steam before I got to the how!
Sceptic’s defiance isn’t a bad start though
A fascinating collection of data in this report – some new; some begging questions; and some confirming well-known facts. Of course, there are bound to be a lot of those begged questions in any data set like this, and it is clear that the underlying premise is that there was a significant pandemic, as opposed to a simple rise in the floor of historically low mortality, which was partially indicated by an already slowly rising trend. I haven’t unpicked the full implications of the section on ‘preventable disease’ – but it looks as if there is a lot in there relating to the deaths linked to Covid, as opposed to naive policy assumptions about SARS-CoV-2 itself. Of course, this has been an area of constant concern here. The graphs give no support to the effectiveness of NPIs between various countries. As to the particular finding on life expectancy : the blunt fact is that I, along with the majority of the population, am still alive – but have now had almost two years of quality life stolen by political decisions made on the back of a grossly over-hyped viral infection. One underlying big lie conflates two highly questionable ‘givens’ :… Read more »
Ah, but if you apply climate change heuristics, that tiny one-year change can and must be extrapolated a hundred years into the future to prove that we’ll all die before we’re born.
The science is settled.
Another vomit inducing picture!
Why are we destroying people’s lives and livelihoods and dismantling our freedoms to avoid going back to 2009 levels of mortality? False premise. They are not doing what they are doing to prevent a decline in mortality. It is uncomfortable listening to Javid bleating about how important it is to have NHS workers vaccinated, claiming that vaccination reduces transmission (which it doesn’t). He knows full well that losing an expected 50,000 nurses and doctors next spring will increase deaths. And he ought to know that there is no statistically significant benefit of the vaccine (admitted by Pfizer themselves) against infection after a few months. Many, many of the government policies have very predictably resulted in increased deaths. Take, for example, the plain fact that people with Covid positive test results are never given any treatment until they end up in hospital, when things are already too far advanced to save them all. Take the shipment of infected persons from hospitals to care homes, then denial of any residents there to be moved to hospital when they fell ill, the abundant DNR notices issued, not to mention the ‘good deaths’ appointed for them by administration of Midozalam. Not to mention that… Read more »
Out of interest, does anyone know what criteria the Italians used to slash their ‘from Covid’ deaths by 97%, and can the same be applied her?
But, if the bulk of the Italian populace is happily rolling up their sleeves for the poison jabs while being told officially that they are at practically zero risk, what the fuck is wrong with them?
I noticed that one of the angry & negative comments (in Italian) beneath the original article by the editor of “IL TEMPO” suggested that a ~4,000 person study was used to determine the correct proportions of died “with” and died “of”. This commenteer then complained that the data from this sub-sample was then extrapolated to the overall big figure, resulting in the headline claim of vast over-attribution.
Certainly, this was about the extent of media analysis, a small article & few comments in a minor newspaper – but from a serious journalist & his detractors. Maybe there is a wider news footprint is Italy, not just a ZH churn etc, but I haven’t noticed it.
I don’t get it.
Isn’t the median age of death from covid 82.4 while the median all cause death was 81.7 or something like that? If the median age of death for covid is higher than the median all cause death, than how can covid be responsible for the drop in life expectancy?
As with all these anomalous aspects of pandemic management, I always try to gain a clearer insight by trying to see the situation from the other side (i.e. the pro-lockdown) of the argument, as well as from my own anti-lockdown stance. The pro-lockdown zealots may well suggest that had no restrictions been introduced, then life expectancy would have been lowered even further, while the pro-freedom camp (most of the viewers of this website, to hazard a guess) may argue that life expectancy would have not reduced as much as it did, absent restrictions. This we can never know for certain either way without the aid of a time-machine, as you would have to recreate the exact circumstances of the time and place they were introduced and then change only the freedom status of the citizens, to know what difference restrictions make. So next comes the argument that, if even if there is the remotest chance that lockdowns are saving lives or preventing overwhelm of the health service, we should do them just in case they produce these effects. The problem is: Lockdowns are unsustainable and unmanageable for any significant period of time! The mainstream media generally try to make it… Read more »