European Union

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The Covid pandemic has affected life expectancy in Europe, according to latest data across the EU released by its statistics agency Eurostat.

It says, on average, life expectancy at birth has been rising by more than two years per decade since the 1960s. But while many countries have seen that rise slow down in recent years, the decline in 2020 in some EU member states from 2019 is quite marked:

• Belgium's life expectancy fell from 82.1 years to 80.9
• Bulgaria's fell from 75.1 to 73.6 years
• Spain, with life expectancy among Europe's highest, fell from 84 to 82.4 years
• Italy's was down from 83.6 to 82.4
• In Lithuania, Poland and Romania life expectancy from birth was down by 1.4 years
• The Netherlands, France and Austria saw a decline of 0.7 years

EPACopyright: EPA

European Union leaders were promised last night by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that vaccines would be distributed much faster in the coming months and that 70% of adults would be inoculated by the end of June. The row over AstraZeneca dominated the summit. In theory the EU can now impose controversial plans for tougher export restrictions to countries such as the UK and US, but the Dutch, Belgian and German leaders have made it clear they want to avoid them. France's Emmanuel Macron backs the controls, calling for "an end to naivety".

Another important issue for the summit was a complaint by Austria and five other smaller states including Latvia and Bulgaria that they had suffered from the EU’s vaccine distribution system. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said he was happy that an additional 10 million doses would be used to ensure fairer delivery in the next three months.

Meanwhile, a number of European states are seeing very high infection rates. Romania has imposed weekend curfews for towns where cases are high, and Ukraine has recorded a daily record in the past 24 hours with 18,132 cases.

Germany has been recording daily infection rates over 20,000 this week and is imposing new rules for anyone flying in from abroad to require a negative test before departure from Sunday.

France reported over 45,000 daily infections late on Thursday and the rising number of patients in intensive care, now 4,709, is almost as high as the last peak in November.