Australians are living longer from lockdowns

Photo: Unsplash - Pandemic restrictions have led to longer life expectancy for Australians, a new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has found. A silver lining to seemingly endless days in lockdown is that Australians' life expectancy jumped in 2020. Instead of the expected average annual increase in longevity of 0.09-0.14 years seen from 2015 to 2019, researchers found an increase of 0.7 years from 2019 to 2020 for both females and males. This was the greatest increase of all the countries looked at in the study, published in the  International Journal of Epidemiology . The countries with the next highest increases were Denmark and Norway, both with 0.1 and 0.2 years for females and males respectively. In contrast, the United States has seen a decrease in life expectancy, with losses of -1.7 and -2.2 years for females and males respectively. The researchers say Australia's quick response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including closing borders and implementing lockdowns, was what differentiated Australia's longevity outcome from the United States.