During the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, Lithuania recorded 70% more deaths than usual. Now, the mortality is finally returning to the pre-pandemic levels, experts say.
In 11 months of 2023, just under 32,000 people died in Lithuania. Last year, almost 39,000 people died in the same period, in 2021 – 43,000, in 2020 – 37,000, and in 2019 – 35,000.
Moreover, Lithuania’s population has also slightly increased, so the most important indicator of the number of deaths per 1,000 people should improve this year, once the complete data is released.
The number of excess deaths has also declined this year, while life expectancy has been rising in recent years, according to Daumantas Stumbrys, a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Lithuanian Centre of Social Sciences. Excess deaths are typically defined as the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods.
“Those rates are quite low and have reached pre-pandemic levels, at least for 2023. But of course, in the last months of the year, we always have higher mortality because of respiratory diseases,” he said.
During the pandemic years, the number of excess deaths increased dramatically in Lithuania not only because of Covid-19 mortality but also because medical institutions did not function normally, and people delayed health checks.
Aurimas Galkontas, a lecturer at the Faculty of Public Health at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU), notes that the number of deaths in Lithuania increased significantly in January 2020. In December 2021, Lithuania reached peak mortality, with 70 percent more deaths than usual.
In 2022 Lithuania also recorded excess mortality but in 2023 there were fewer deaths than before the pandemic. According to Eurostat data, in October of that year the number of excess deaths in Lithuania was 3.8 percent lower than in 2016-2019. In February 2023 the excess mortality rate was -22.8 percent, or 23 percent lower than in the pre-pandemic years, which was the best in the EU, Galkontas explained.
However, it is not yet clear whether Lithuania’s life expectancy has returned to pre-pandemic levels. The increased mortality during the pandemic has led to a reduction in life expectancy in the country.
“If we look at annual indicators of life expectancy, we see some positive changes, but we have not yet reached pre-pandemic levels,” Strumbrys said. “In 2019, life expectancy for men was 71.5 years, dropping to 70 in 2020, 69.6 in 2021, and bouncing back to 70.9 in 2022. This means that we are definitely approaching the pre-pandemic level, but we still need to wait for the 2023 data to be able to compare the annual rates.”
The estimated death rate per 1000 in Canada in 2023 was 8.2 deaths. Life expectancy for Canada in 2023 was 82.96 years, a 0.18% increase from 2022. That year also saw a 0.18% increase from 2021.
According to a 2023 study by Stumbrys, the 2018 decision to introduce shorter alcohol sale hours in Lithuania has led to a drop in male deaths on Sundays and Mondays. Alcohol control laws were considerably tightened by the then government led by the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union, raising the legal drinking age to 20 and banning all alcohol advertising.
