In Hamburg, the average life expectancy fell in the two pandemic years 2020 and 2021. It decreased by around half a year between 2019 and 2021, as the Federal Institute for Population Research announced in Wiesbaden on Wednesday. It decreased by 0.53 years for newborn boys and by 0.48 years for newborn girls.
This puts the Hanseatic city in 6th place after Schleswig-Holstein, Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saarland and is above the average. Life expectancy in Germany fell by 0.4 years for women and by 0.6 years for men.
In the federal states of Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia, which were particularly affected by corona waves, the life expectancy of men in 2021 was around one and a half years lower than before the pandemic, and for women a little more than a year, as the experts calculated. Schleswig-Holstein is at the other end of the scale. According to the information, life expectancy in men even increased by 0.2 years between 2019 and 2021, while women showed a comparatively small decrease of minus 0.2.
Across Germany, life expectancy fell by 0.2 years to 78.49 years for men and by 0.1 years to 83.36 years for women during the first corona year of 2020, as the calculations show. “When alpha and delta variants dominated in 2021, it fell another 0.4 years in males and 0.3 years in females,” it said. Before the start of the pandemic, life expectancy in Germany had increased by around 0.1 year per year.
Life expectancy calculates the average length of life that newborns would live if the age-specific mortality rates recorded in one year were held constant over the next 115 years.