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Inequalities in Lifespans and Life Lost due to COVID-19: Pioneering Demographic Science and Analysis

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Funding £1.3M
Period Aug 2024 — Aug 2029

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The COVID-19 pandemic killed millions, but the pandemic’s true toll on how long people live—and how unequal those lifespans are—remains poorly measured. Standard life expectancy figures are averages. They hide the widening gap between people who die young and those who live long. This project will measure that hidden inequality. It will analyse multiple causes of death, not just COVID-19 itself, to trace the indirect ways the pandemic shortened lives—through delayed cancer diagnoses, overwhelmed health systems, and economic disruption. It will also break down years of life lost by sex, revealing whether men and women were affected differently. If successful, this work will give governments and public health agencies a far sharper tool for assessing a pandemic’s true cost. Instead of relying on a single average number, policymakers could see how mortality patterns shifted across age groups and sexes, and which indirect pathways did the most damage. That knowledge could reshape how future health emergencies are monitored, and how resources are targeted to protect the most vulnerable populations.

View original technical description
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented rise in mortality around the world. Our knowledge of the impacts of the pandemic on population health is limited and the medium, and long term, consequences are unknown. Life expectancy is the most used metric of population health and longevity. However, life expectancy, as an average indicator, masks variation in length of life, and thus the inherent variation in patterns of mortality. This variation is a fundamental type of inequality that expresses how diverse ages at death are at the population level. This project addresses three major objectives to produce fundamentally new knowledge of the mechanisms that underpin recent mortality trends: 1) To complement all-cause mortality analysis with multiple causes of death to uncover the indirect pathways through which the pandemic has affected mortality; 2) develop and apply demographic methods to quantify how different causes of death affect patterns of life years lost by sex; and 3) analyse the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lifespan inequality. At the intersection of demography with multiple disciplines, including epidemiology, data science, and public health, this project focuses on pressing issues about the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on population health, and challenges current narratives on longevity.

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Researchers

José Aburto (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

Career Development Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.