Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy at birth in Asia

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy at birth (e(0)) for 51 Asian countries and territories from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021. METHOD: Based on age-sex-specific mortality used for estimating the changes in e(0) for years 2019, 2020, and 2021 from the 2022 revision of the World Population Prospects, we employed Arriaga’s discrete method to decompose changes in e(0) into both absolute and relative contributions of changes in age-specific death rate, and further obtained the age-sex-specific contribution to changes in e(0) by country/territory and period (i.e., 2019–2020 and 2020–2021) for Asia. FINDINGS: The COVID-19 pandemic reduced 1.66 years in e(0) of the Asian population from 2019 to 2021, slightly lower than the world average of 1.74 years. South Asia had a high loss of 3.01 years, whereas Eastern Asia had almost no changes. Oman, Lebanon, India, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, and the Philippines experienced a high loss of above 2.5 years in e(0). Despite significant national and territorial variations, the decline of e(0) in Asia was mostly from the age group of 60–79 years, followed by age groups of 80 + and 45–59 years; and age groups of children contributed little (i.e., 0–4 and 5–14 years old). Males suffered more losses than females in this pandemic. Asian nations saw less loss in e(0) in the second year of the pandemic, i.e., 2020–2021, than in the first year, i.e., 2019–2020, but this recovery trend was not observed in Southern Asia and South-Eastern Asia. Countries from Central Asia and Western Asia, such as Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, and Oman, had extraordinarily more losses in e(0) in the first year at ages around 70. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 pandemic had significantly affected e(0) of Asian populations, and most contribution to the reduction of e(0) came from the three older age groups, 60–79 years, 80 + years, and 45–59 years, with great variations across countries/territories. Our findings could have important implications for development of more resilient public health systems in Asian societies with better policy interventions for vulnerable demographic groups. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-023-16426-9.