The same is true for Scotland, where drug deaths have more than doubled in a decade Dundee is now the drug-death capital of Europe. In America, where life expectancy has fallen even more sharply in recent years, “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol and suicide have done the most harm. Working out what has gone wrong is not easy. Death rates for 30- to 49-year-olds have steadily increased in Britain since around 2012, in sharp contrast with neighbouring countries.Ī runner passes street art in appreciation of the NHS placed near to the Francis Drake Bowls Club in Hilly Fields Park, in Lewisham, London. Mortality rates have stalled for infants, and risen among young adults and the middle-aged. But the slowdown in life expectancy has occurred across all age groups. Two features make this figure even more worrying. By The Economist’s calculations, that is no minor difference: it implies that between 20 approximately 700,000 Britons died sooner than they might have. In a best-case scenario, in which the pace of improvement between 19 had been sustained, life expectancy today would have been over 83. Life expectancy at birth today, at 81, is just eight weeks longer than it was in 2011. But something went wrong in the early 2010s. Life expectancy in Britain, as in almost all other rich countries, had been rising for nearly two centuries. When more people are dying and life expectancy is stagnating, a greater number of people are also living in ill health.Īn ambulance drives past St Thomas’ Hospital in central London. The burden these deaths place on the living is not just weighed in grief. If you travel just 10 kilometres from the poshest part of Kensington in London to New Cross Gate, life expectancy for men falls by a staggering 18 years, from 92 to 74. And it disproportionately affected the poor. This slowdown in life expectancy struck all age groups, not just the elderly. The reason is that, in the early 2010s, life expectancy stalled in Britain compared with long-run trends and other countries. Britain has endured a grim decade during which perhaps a quarter of a million people died younger than expected.īy our calculations, that is the number of extra deaths Britain has suffered, compared with similar countries such as France and Denmark. But in the background, long before the pandemic hit, an even more disturbing story has been unfolding. First came the COVID-19 pandemic-then backlogs in health and social care that the coronavirus exacerbated, and a long winter of strikes and overwhelmed emergency departments. In recent years Britain has been hit by one health crisis after another.
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