During the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, Lithuania recorded 70 percent 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.
“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 the 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.
“If we look at Eurostat data, we can see that in October, the number of excess deaths in Lithuania was 3.8 percent lower than in 2016-2019. [...] If we summarise, we could say that the situation is not bad, it is improving. For example, in February this year, 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 the 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.”
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