How do you assess the impact of the Covid pandemic on a population?
One way is by examining life expectancy, or the average number of years a person can expect to live.
A team of 10 researchers from the UK, the US and Europe have studied the mortality impacts of the pandemic in India by sex, social group and age.
Their peer-reviewed paper has been published in Science Advances, a US journal.
They found that life expectancy at birth in India was 2.6 years lower and mortality was 17% higher in 2020 compared to 2019.
This implied 1.19 million excess deaths in 2020. Excess deaths are a simple measure of how many more people are dying than expected, compared with previous years.
The researchers of the new study say life expectancy declines in India were larger and affected a younger age profile compared to high-income countries.
They found that mortality rose among all age groups, but compared to high-income countries, the increase was particularly pronounced in younger age groups, leading to larger declines in life expectancy.
The researchers also found something which was more worrying.
For one, females experienced a life expectancy decline of one year greater than males. This contrasts with patterns in most other countries and may be due to gender inequality, say the researchers from University of Oxford, University of California, Berkeley and Paris School of Economics, among others.
Also, marginalised social groups – Muslims, Dalits, and tribespeople – in India saw larger declines in life expectancy compared to privileged upper caste people, exacerbating existing disparities.
