A team led by Viennese demographers analyzed how differently the Covid 19 pandemic affected death and birth rates in European countries. According to the evaluation, twelve (2020) or ten percent (2021) more people died in Austria compared to 2019 – a significantly lower increase than in many countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Life expectancy fell slightly in this country. However, the pandemic brought a slight increase in births.
Tomáš Sobotka from the Institute for Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) explained to journalists on Tuesday that “no major effect” was observed in births across Europe. Already at the beginning of the first lockdown in spring 2020, there was lively speculation about a “corona baby boom”. However, the actual development went in the opposite direction, as the researchers around Sobotka, Zuzanna Brzozowska and Kryštof Zeman show in their “European Demographic Datasheet” created together with colleagues from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg near Vienna and the University of Vienna – at least at the beginning of the pandemic.
Nevertheless, a lot has happened in this area: From the end of the first year of the pandemic, nine months after the first lockdowns in most states, there was a decline in births almost everywhere. In December 2020, Austria recorded a minus of five percent compared to the number of births in the same month in 2019. For comparison: the EU average minus was eight percent, in Spain the first lockdown had the strongest impact (21 percent fewer births year-on-year at the end of 2020).
Insecurity led to a decline in births
For Sobotka, the most obvious explanation for this is the “uncertainty” in the first phase of the pandemic, especially where it claimed a relatively large number of victims and states reacted with rigid containment measures. In spring 2021, however, the minus turned into a slight increase in births on average in the EU. As early as February 2021, Austria recorded a slightly higher number of births compared to February 2020. The first signs that “the pandemic is over” in the first Corona summer and the insight that the labor market is not in the process of dissolving should have had an effect here, explained Brzozowska and Sobotka.
As a result, there was also a relatively strong increase in births in Germany in autumn 2021. In the winter lockdowns before that, some couples seem to have implemented their family plans again. At the end of 2021, for example, many second and third births were seen in Austria.
“Less Stress” in Northern Europe
The development in northern Europe is different: Here you can hardly see a slump in birth rates as a result of the first phase of the pandemic and then a often striking and constant increase. Here, the pandemic could “perhaps have brought less stress” to large parts of society than in our latitudes, said Sobotka.
Covid-19 brought very large differences in the death rates and, accordingly, in the development of life expectancy. In Kosovo, the number of deaths in 2020 and 2021 was 36 percent higher than in 2019. The increase in Albania (34 percent), Russia and Bulgaria (28 percent each) and North Macedonia (26 percent) was similarly dramatic. According to the demographers, these values are the highest since the Second World War and internationally comparable with the increase in deaths caused by AIDS in parts of Africa in the 1990s.
The excess mortality recorded in this country has also not been recorded since the Second World War. However, it was almost always much lower in the western countries of Europe than in many southern and eastern countries. Poor pandemic management, sometimes lax compliance with measures and low vaccination rates have led to a significant drop in life expectancy there. This exacerbated the divergence in expectable lifespans in Europe that existed before the pandemic.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the life expectancy of Russian women has fallen by an average of 3.7 years. The average Spaniard (life expectancy: 85.9 years) can now expect to live eleven years longer than women in Russia (74.4 years). The life expectancy of Russian men (65.5 years) is a whopping 17 years shorter than that of Swiss men (82.3 years). Significant losses in life expectancy were also recorded in the Czech Republic and Hungary (roughly minus two years).
In Germany, the loss was just under half a year and thus somewhat lower than in Germany. Life expectancy in Austria in 2020 was 83.6 years for women and 78.9 years for men. Compared to the pre-Corona year 2019, it fell by 0.6 years for Austrians and 0.8 years for Austrians. With the exception of Sweden, which recorded a similar excess mortality rate as Central European countries, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, Covid-19 hardly changed life expectancy in many Nordic countries, according to the experts. (apa)