And as the short-term effects of COVID-19 on mortality rates – hopefully – recede, it’s also worth thinking about how any supposed ‘bouncing back’ in life expectancy might be reported.
In the 16 weeks to 18 June 2021, 5,979 people who died in England and Wales had COVID-19 mentioned on their death certificate. But despite that, overall mortality figures are in fact currently remarkably low: in those 16 weeks in England and Wales, some 9,790 fewer people died of any cause than the average for the same period in 2015-2019.
Writing in The Guardian, Professor David Spiegelhalter and his colleague Anthony Masters explained: “Of the deaths that we are not seeing, many are the shadows of those who were taken early.”
If the current trend within the UK of having both a low COVID death rate and a very low death rate from other causes continues, we may well soon see reports that life expectancy has suddenly ‘shot up’.
But comparing the worst months of a pandemic with the period immediately afterwards is clearly misleading. When life expectancy across the UK is reported to have risen in 2022, or possibly even in the latter half of 2021, the government will try to claim credit. At that point it will be crucial to compare life-expectancy statistics in the UK with that of other European countries and ask – why is ours still so low? And, why has life expectancy in the UK risen so very slowly since its 2014 peak in comparison to everywhere else in Europe?
The inequities and health effects that Professor Marmot has described are largely the product of a ‘devil take the hindmost’ political attitude, which has pervaded the Conservative Party since the 1980s. Many current government ministers, and the prime minister himself, have been – at best – relaxed about inequality since their teenage years in that decade. But it was, of course, the steep rise in inequality in the 1980s, and its persistently high levels ever since, that got us to where we are today – with poorer people and poorer regions so brutally exposed to both this virus and most other causes of preventable death.
Turning the trends around will require real, not fake, commitment, as well as huge effort and probably a great deal of time. I hope I see it happen in my lifetime. I do not expect to see it happen under the current administration.
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