During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people believed that most of the people who died were so old that, according to life expectancy, they should have died already. In other words, people died "past life expectancy", we were told, and therefore the virus was not much to worry about. But is that really true?
We often hear about life expectancy in different countries, and Norway is one of the countries with the highest life expectancy. Indeed, in 2020, when the pandemic started, life expectancy was 81.48 years for men and 84.89 years for women. For both genders combined, life expectancy in Norway was 83.20 years according to the Statistics Norway (SSB).
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According to the The Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH), most COVID-19 deaths occurred in 2022, and the median age of deaths related to COVID-19 was 85.6 years. If we look at the period from the start of the pandemic in 2020 up to and including autumn 2022, NIPH summarises it as follows:
The median age of COVID-19-associated death is 84.8 years, with a slightly higher age of death from COVID-19 as an underlying cause of death (85.0 years) than as a contributing cause (83.5 years).
They also write:
The excess mortality in per cent is highest in the age group 80 to 89 years (20 per cent). However, the mortality rate is still far higher among those over 90 years of age than in the younger groups of the population.
So if life expectancy is just over 83 years, and the median age of those who died was around 85 years, was it really worth introducing so many infection control measures when most of those who died "should have died already"?
But this reasoning is based on a misunderstanding of how life expectancy is calculated.
Life expectancy is not what many people think
When we say that life expectancy in Norway in 2020 was 83.20 years for both genders combined, this is the life expectancy for those born in 2020, i.e. calculated from year 0 of their life onwards.
Unfortunately, a few die at a young age. A few more die in adulthood. But the vast majority live to a reasonable old age. This means that if you have survived until you are 50, you are no longer part of the group that includes everyone who was born in the same year as you, but instead you are part of a subgroup of those who have already survived for fifty years. Those who didn't die from accidents, cancer, heart attacks or other causes.
And if you have survived that long, life expectancy increases. The calculation changes because you no longer need to include those who died before they reached 50 when calculating how long you can live from the age of 50 onwards.
In the old days, you only lived to the age of 35...
This is very similar to the common misconception that people used to live very short lives. Yes, life expectancy in 1900 was only about 53 years. In 1750, life expectancy was barely 35 years. But that doesn't mean that most people died when they were around 35 years old.
No, life expectancy at birth was only low because around 25 per cent died before the age of one! The infant mortality rate was enormously high, but if you survived to the age of 5 without dying from diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough or measles, you had beaten the odds and life expectancy was much higher. And if you survived to the age of 20 without dying of tuberculosis or in war, it increased even further.
So it wasn't the case in the Middle Ages that you never saw any old people because everyone died early. They rarely lived to be as old as today, but once you had survived childhood, you usually lived to be at least 65 years old.
Due to better healthcare, antibiotics, clean water, better nutrition and vaccines/flock immunity, today only 0.25 per cent of Norwegian children die before their first birthday, and life expectancy is therefore much higher.
Life expectancy corrected
When we talk about "life expectancy", we must therefore calculate from the age a person already is in a given year.
So what was the actual life expectancy for old people infected with the coronavirus in 2020? Well, you can see this table from Statistics Norway, which shows the remaining life expectancy based on the age of the person in 2020:
If an 80-year-old fell ill with COVID-19 in 2020, life expectancy for this person would be almost 90 years. Not just over 83 years. So if they ended up dying from COVID-19, they therefore died not just three years, but around ten years "too early".
And if you were 85 years old, life expectancy was almost 92 years. If you had reached the tender age of 90 when you were infected, life expectancy was 94.5 years, and a death then would have been almost 5 years before a statistically expected death, not almost 12 years after expected death.
So an 85-year-old who died of COVID-19 did not die “past life expectancy”. The average 85-year-old was never expected to have died already. On the contrary, they were expected to live for many more years - despite the fact that the life expectancy of a newborn is less than 85 years.
So it's time to put an end to the misconception that most people who died from COVID-19 died "past life expectancy". This is both an inhumane way of assessing human dignity, as well as a major statistical misunderstanding.
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