Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 10 – Russian officials are celebrating the report that Russian life expectancy in 2023 rose to the highest level in history, a development that seems counter-intuitive given the fact that combat deaths among young Russian men rose because of fighting in Ukraine and infant mortality failed to fall by any significant amount.
The reason for this development, Ilya Klimkin and Aby Shukyurov of the To Be Precise portal says, is that the elderly were living longer and that despite the fact that healthcare facilities for them had neither expanded or improved over the last several years but for another reason that no one can be entirely happy about (tochno.st/materials/v-2023-godu-prodolzitelnost-zizni-dostigla-rekorda-za-vsiu-istoriiu-rossii-nesmotria-na-skacok-smertnosti-molodyx-muzcin-obieiasniaem-kak-eto-vozmozno).
What has happened among this age group, the two researchers say, is that the covid pandemic killed off many of the less healthy Russian elderly and those who survived, being more vigorous, are living longer, more than enough to make up for the deaths among young men to boost Russia’s overall life expectancy rate.
As Klimkin and Shukyurov point out, this is an unprecedented development in Russian history. Generally, Russia has achieved increases in life expectancy by reducing infant and child mortality, any reductions of which have the largest impact on life expectancy figures for the population as a whole.
But it is also a development that is not going to make a contribution to boosting life expectancy in the future not only because those elderly who did survive covid are now older and thus more likely to die but because Putin’s healthcare optimization program means that many of them who might otherwise be saved won’t be.
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