In the midst of a pandemic that has killed at least 5 million people - and as many as 15 million, according to some estimates - life expectancy for New Zealanders is actually rising.
That can't be said for most countries looked at in a new study, published on Thursday in the British Medical Journal. Researchers analysed data from 37 upper-middle and high-income countries to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy, and found just six didn't see it decline.
They were New Zealand, Taiwan, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and South Korea. Of those, just New Zealand, Taiwan and Norway saw life expectancy go up, as it had every year between 2005 and 2019 in all 37 nations looked at.
New Zealand and Taiwan in 2020 implemented zero-tolerance elimination policies towards COVID-19, whilst Norway - unlike its neighbour Sweden - adopted a tough suppression strategy to limit the virus' spread.
In 2020, New Zealanders lived about 0.66 years longer than expected - the biggest gain of any country in the study.
The study
The researchers looked at how many years of life were lost (YLL) in each nation in 2020 to all causes. They found 28 million years of life were lost prematurely across the 37 countries.
When it first emerged, it quickly became clear older people were much more at risk of death from the coronavirus - leading some to erroneously claim the pandemic had no impact on life expectancy, because most of its victims were likely to die soon anyway.
This was debunked in February, when research found the average victim had 16 years left on the clock - that's because life expectancy at birth includes people who die young, but someone who's already made it to their 70s or 80s is likely to keep ticking along for a while yet.
The biggest drops in years of life lost in 2020 were found in Russia (−2.33 in men and −2.14 in women), which almost a year on is in the grip of its biggest wave of deaths yet. Coming in second was the US, which has posted the most confirmed deaths of any nation (−2.27 in men and −1.61 in women), followed by Bulgaria, Lithuania, Chile and Spain.
"Our findings of a comparable or lower than expected YLL in Taiwan, New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and South Korea underscore the importance of successful viral suppression and elimination policies, including targeted and population-based public health policy interventions," the study authors wrote.
One limitation of the study was that they couldn't take socioeconomic factors and ethnicities into account, and were unable to include more countries in the analysis - such as those from Asia, Africa and Latin America - due to a lack of data.
"As many of the effects of the pandemic might take a longer time frame to have a measurable effect on human lives, continuous and timely monitoring of excess YLL would help identify the sources of excess mortality and excess YLL in population subgroups."
Statistics NZ in April reported New Zealand's life expectancy at birth for 2019 was 80 for men and 83.5 for women.
Elimination strategy's benefits keep growing
New Zealand's initial response to the pandemic was hailed globally. Just 25 deaths to COVID-19 were recorded in 2020, and so far in 2021 there have been just three more confirmed, despite the recent outbreak of the Delta variant and the Government's abandoning of the elimination strategy.
This is likely due to the vaccine rollout - though the Delta variant is able to infect vaccinated people, it's not only far less likely but those who unfortunately develop COVID-19 are far less likely to fall seriously ill than the unvaccinated. After a slow start, New Zealand is now the 28th-most vaccinated country in the world for first doses - ahead of early starters such as the UK and US - and 34th for second, according to the New York Times.
A previous study published in May found New Zealand was the only country in the OECD to have had fewer reported deaths in 2020 than expected based on past trends .
"New Zealand stood out as the only country that had a lower than expected mortality across all the age groups, in both men and women, with no sex difference in excess death rates, which could potentially be attributed to the country's elimination strategy early in the pandemic," the study, published in the British Medical Journal, said.
The successful lockdown, which began in March and lasted until mid-May, limited the spread of not just COVID-19 but other communicable diseases, such as the flu, which normally kills hundreds of Kiwis every year. It also temporarily dropped the road toll and the suicide rate.
