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

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.