"Not only has the pandemic set back healthy longevity worldwide by years, it also reversed the previous trends of shifting disease burden to noncommunicable diseases," the report said.
In other long-COVID research news, a study in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases describes new estimates of long-COVID incidence and clinical study trends in a number of regions.
Almost 900 cases of the virus have been recorded in 2024 so far, compared with 368 cases recorded 2023, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), meaning England has seen more cases of the disease in the first four months of this year, than in the whole of last year.
An international team of health and medical researchers including workers at the WHO, working with economists and modeling specialists, has found that the use of vaccines to prevent or treat disease has saved the lives of approximately 154 million people over the past half-century.
In their study, published in The Lancet, the group used mathematical and statistical modeling to develop estimates for lives saved due to vaccines and then added them together to find the total.
