During the corona pandemic, average life expectancy fell significantly more in some federal states than in others. “In the analysis between 2019 and 2021, the southern regions of eastern Germany have recorded the strongest declines,” said Markus Sauerberg from the Federal Institute for Population Research on Wednesday in Wiesbaden. The life expectancy determined relates to the people born in the corresponding year.
In the federal states of Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia, which are particularly affected by corona waves, the average life expectancy of newborn boys in 2021 was around one and a half years lower than before the pandemic, and for newborn girls just over a year.
Schleswig-Holstein is at the other end of the scale. Life expectancy there climbed by 0.2 years between 2019 and 2021 for newborn boys, while there was a comparatively small decrease in the forecasts for newborn girls with a minus of 0.2.
Life expectancy in Germany fell by 0.2 years to 78.49 years for boys and by 0.1 years to 83.36 years for girls during the first Corona year 2020, as the calculations show. When the alpha and delta variants dominated in 2021, it fell by a further 0.4 years in boys and by 0.3 years in girls. Before the start of the pandemic, life expectancy in Germany had increased by around 0.1 year per year.
According to the experts, a falling life expectancy of more than one year is very unusual outside of wartime. “Reductions of this magnitude were last recorded at the end of the GDR,” explained the research director at the Federal Institute, Sebastian Klüsener. The strong regional differences can be explained, among other things, with the infection situation, the corona measures taken and the behavior of the population. The proximity to severely affected neighboring countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland also plays a role.
Life expectancy is the average length of life that newborns would live if one-year age-specific mortality rates were held constant over the next 115 years.