WHO: global life expectancy nearly back to pre-pandemic levels

The World Health Organization’s new Global Health Estimates analyze health trends in countries and regions worldwide between 2000 and 2023. The most immediate figure concerns global life expectancy, which reached 73.3 years in 2023, a value very close to the 73.4 years recorded in 2019, before the pandemic.

Healthy life expectancy, on the other hand, stood at 62.8 years, still below the pre-pandemic level. This is a sign, according to the reported data, of a quantitative recovery in years lived that does not match an equal recovery in the quality of those years: people are living almost as long as before the pandemic, but with more years marked by illness or disability compared with 2019.

Between 2019 and 2023, the global rate of years of life lost to depressive disorders rose by about 20%, while that linked to anxiety disorders grew by nearly 45%. Overall, the estimate indicates around 110 million years of healthy life lost to these two conditions over the period covered by the report.

The news currently comes from a single journalistic source drawing on the WHO’s Global Health Estimates report; no further independent confirmation is currently available beyond the data released by the organization itself.

The picture emerging from the report places mental health at the center of the post-pandemic recovery: while life expectancy approaches 2019 levels, years lost to depression and anxiety continue to rise, in a trajectory that the report documents through the 2000-2023 historical series but does not explain in terms of its specific causes.

The two combined trends — recovering life expectancy and a growing burden of years lost to mental health — define the gap that the WHO records between the quantity and quality of years lived globally over the 2019-2023 period.