Global life expectancy remains below pre-pandemic levels

The World Health Organization published on 2 October 2026 the new Global Health Estimates, the periodic update measuring life expectancy and causes of death worldwide. The picture that emerges is one of incomplete recovery: in 2023 global life expectancy stood at 73.3 years, a figure still slightly below the 73.4 years recorded in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic.

The gap becomes more pronounced when looking not only at the length of life but at its quality. Healthy life expectancy — the number of years a person can expect to live free of significant disease or disability — stands at 62.8 years, a shortfall of 0.4 years compared with the pre-pandemic level. The difference between the two indicators, more than ten years, indicates that a substantial portion of average lifespan is spent in compromised health conditions, regardless of whether overall life duration increases or not.

The most significant finding, however, concerns the composition of causes of death. Non-communicable diseases — heart disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic respiratory conditions — are now responsible for 74% of deaths worldwide. In 2000 this share stood at 58%. The sixteen-percentage-point increase in just over two decades describes a structural transformation in global patterns of illness and death: the relative weight of infectious diseases is declining, while that of chronic conditions linked to population ageing, lifestyle and access to care is growing.

This transformation has direct consequences for healthcare systems. Non-communicable diseases typically require longer care pathways, often spanning the patient’s entire life, and a care network different from the one built around infectious emergencies. The Global Health Estimates do not indicate how different countries are responding to this shift, but the simple movement of the centre of gravity of causes of death toward chronic conditions implies growing demand for continuous care, early diagnosis and long-term management — factors that affect public health spending regardless of a country’s income level.

The question of the shortfall still unrecovered since 2019 also remains open. The Global Health Estimates do not explicitly attribute the residual gap to a specific cause, and it is not possible to establish from the published data whether it stems from prolonged effects of the pandemic, from other health factors emerging during the period, or from a combination of elements. The figure itself — four tenths of a year less in healthy life expectancy — is nonetheless the most recent measure available and allows, for the first time, a direct comparison with the period before 2020.

It should be noted that this analysis is based on a single source: the news currently comes from a single origin (the World Health Organization, through its own Global Health Estimates); no independent confirmation available at the time of publication.

The next updates to the Global Health Estimates, expected on a periodic basis from the WHO, will make it possible to verify whether the gap with 2019 narrows further or whether the share of deaths attributable to non-communicable diseases continues to grow at the pace observed over the past two decades.