IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/vid/yearbk/v20y2022i1oid0x003da265.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Comparing the loss of life expectancy at birth during the 2020 and 1918 pandemics in six European countries

Author

Listed:
  • Valentin Rousson
  • Fred Paccaud
  • Isabella Locatelli

Abstract

Supplementary File Supplementary material The COVID-19 pandemic that reached Europe in 2020 has often been compared to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. In this article, we compare the two pandemics in terms of their respective impacts on the loss of life expectancy at birth in six European countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland) by estimating life expectancy in 2020 using Eurostat data. We found that the loss of life expectancy at birth was up to 20 times larger between 1917 and 1918 than between 2019 and 2020. A decomposition of these losses clearly shows that in all six countries, the main contributors were older age groups in 2020 and younger age groups in 1918. These observations are consistent with evidence indicating that most COVID-19 fatalities were among the elderly, while a majority of Spanish flu fatalities were among the young.

Suggested Citation

  • Valentin Rousson & Fred Paccaud & Isabella Locatelli, 2022. "Comparing the loss of life expectancy at birth during the 2020 and 1918 pandemics in six European countries," Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, vol. 20(1), pages 527-542.
    • Handle: RePEc:vid:yearbk:v:20:y:2022:i:1:oid:0x003da265
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://austriaca.at/0xc1aa5576_0x003da265.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:vid:yearbk:v:20:y:2022:i:1:oid:0x003da265. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bernhard Rengs (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.