COVID-19's grip has loosened globally, with deaths declining significantly since 2023.
WHO indicates that the world is on a recovery path, but is not yet at pre-pandemic levels.
Long-term effects, including 'long COVID,' continue to impact millions, raising concerns about public health recovery and life expectancy trends.
Nearly seven years after the COVID-19 outbreak became a pandemic, killing more than 7 million people and causing an estimated 22 million excess deaths globally between 2020 and 2023, the raging question is: have we escaped from its clutch? According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 has not featured among the top 10 leading causes of death since 2023, when the UN agency declared it no longer a global health emergency. But COVID-19 continues to kill, though not in numbing numbers. From August 22 to September 20, it killed 363 people—65 more than in the preceding 28-day period, according to WHO. Pandemics of this scale are known to cripple public health for decades. Is that what is happening here?
The pandemic did bend the ascending global life expectancy curve. The latest “Global Health Estimates” by WHO indicates that the world is on a recovery path in terms of health parameters since the pandemic began, but it is not yet at pre-pandemic levels. “Global life expectancy reached 73.3 years in 2023, close to 73.4 years recorded in 2019. Healthy life expectancy has recovered more slowly, reaching 62.8 years in 2023, still 0.4 years below its 2019 level,” says WHO. In 2021, with 9.4 million deaths directly attributed to COVID-19, it was the leading cause of death. In the first two years of the pandemic—2020 and 2021—the viral pandemic killed 14.7 million people. The number decreased to 0.9 million in 2023, making it the 14th leading cause of deaths in the world.
In India, it was an unprecedented outcome. According to an analysis in the “State of India’s Environment 2026” report published by the Centre for Science and Environment and Down To Earth, “India had made significant strides in improving life expectancy at birth—from just 49.7 years in the early 1970s to 70 years by the 2016–20 periods. This steady upward trend, sustained for nearly five decades, was abruptly interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.” In 2017-21, life expectancy at birth declined to 69.8 years. The drop, though seemingly modest at 0.2 years, is a critical demographic indicator, especially for a country that had consistently made gains over the years. There were 8.1 million deaths in India in 2020, which rose to 10.2 million in 2021. It was the first time in 55 years that the death count increased in the country.
But the long-term effects of COVID-19—also called “long COVID”, with over 200 listed symptoms—continue to inflict millions adding to the morbidity levels. WHO estimates that six in 100 people with COVID-19 have reported long-term effects. Such lingering effects have been found to be more prominent in those who contracted the virus in the first two years of its outbreak. And these effects persist for months; nearly 15 per cent of COVID-19-infected people had them for a year after recovery. A study on long COVID in the US, published in Nature, says, “Long COVID years lived with disability approximate those of Alzheimer’s and Asthma.”
An analysis of existing research and studies by the Chitkara University, Punjab finds that nearly 32 per cent of those infected with COVID-19 in India had long COVID. The researchers used this data to measure that nearly half a million YLDs (years of healthy life lost due to disability) could be attributed to long COVID. So, the ripple effects of the pandemic are being felt in long COVID morbidity. Probably, the world has more people living with long effects of the pandemic than any other recent pandemics, particularly viral ones.
This column was originally published in the October 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth