Life expectancy in Hungary is lower than it was ten years ago

In many European countries, the coronavirus epidemic has left a permanent mark on life expectancy – Transformation From the latest Eurostat data. A year ago, we wrote that life expectancy at birth declined from 2019 to 2020 in most of the 27 member states of the European Union. Eurostat has now published preliminary data for 2021, and this is already a much more mixed picture.

Some countries, notably Western Europe, have managed to return to their pre-Covid values, but in Eastern and Central Europe, where the epidemic broke out most in 2021, there is no improvement yet, in fact.

The largest negative change was measured in Slovakia and Bulgaria, where life expectancy at birth decreased by 2.2 years from 2020 to 2021, but Latvia (-2.1 years) and Estonia (-2 years) are not far behind. It is followed by Romania (-1.3 years) and Hungary (-1.2 years), Greece (-1.1 years) and Croatia (-1).

By comparison, life expectancy in Belgium increased by 1.1 years last year, bringing it close to pre-pandemic levels, but Spain and Sweden also measured a higher value about a year ago than in 2020. However, there are also countries that have not You feel an epidemic in this regard. There was little change in Denmark, Germany and Finland, while the value in Luxembourg was slightly higher than it was before Covid.

According to preliminary estimates, Spain now has the highest life expectancy of 83.3 years of the 27 countries in the European Union, while Bulgaria has the lowest life expectancy in nearly 12 years. Spaniards, Italians, and Maltese are not far behind the Spaniards, while Bulgaria has overtaken Romania, Latvia and Hungary.

However, with a value of 74.5 years, Hungary is still about six years behind the EU27 average, while most member states are at least a year ahead of the EU average.

The impact of the pandemic is more pronounced when countries in the region are compared to the EU average. As shown in the figure below, the worst year for the EU-27 began to improve last year, while it deteriorated everywhere in Visegrad and Romania, and life expectancy was lower in all five countries than it was ten years ago. It was between 74.4 and 78 years old in 2011, and by 2021 it had fallen to 72.9 and 77.4 years old. There was also a slight change in the rankings: Slovakia temporarily moved to second place in 2020 (not counting the EU average of 27), but slipped to third place in 2021, so much so that it was closer to Hungary in fourth place than before, Life expectancy at birth in 2019 and between 2021 and 20 years fell by two years.