Vietnamese life expectancy slightly reduced due to COVID-19

In the proposal to develop a draft Law on Disease Prevention sent to the Government, the Ministry of Health said that over the past 15 years, Vietnam has achieved important achievements in health care.

The average life expectancy of Vietnamese people has increased from 73.3 years to 73.7 years, however, by 2021, the average life expectancy has slightly decreased to 73.6 years due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tuổi thọ người Việt giảm nhẹ do COVID-19 - Ảnh 1.

People with long life expectancy have to live with many years of illness. Photo: Huu Hung

According to the report, among 10 Southeast Asian countries, Vietnamese men's life expectancy ranks 5th and Vietnamese women's life expectancy ranks 2nd, however, the number of years living with illness is high compared to other countries.

On average, each Vietnamese person has to live with illness for 10 years, which greatly affects the quality of life and reduces the number of healthy years. The burden of disease due to non-communicable diseases accounts for 73.66% of cases and 78.6% of deaths.

According to the Ministry of Health , the important factors leading to the high number of years of living with illness among Vietnamese people are an unreasonable diet (eating few vegetables, too much salt); the rapid increase in non-communicable diseases...

20.8% of the Vietnamese population aged 15 and over currently smoke, including 41.1% of men and 0.6% of women. About one-third of the population (37.3%) have ever been exposed to secondhand smoke.

Nearly two-thirds of men (64.2%) and one-tenth of women (9.8%) currently drink alcohol. About 14.7% of people drink alcohol at a hazardous level (drinking 6 or more units of alcohol at least once in the past 30 days), and this rate is much higher among men (28.5%) than among women (1.0%).

About 59% of the population does not eat enough fruits and vegetables compared to the recommendation that each person should eat at least 5 servings (equivalent to 400g) per day.

The proportion of the population that always or often adds salt, fish sauce or salty spices to food when cooking or while eating is 78.2%. 8.7% always or 3.3% often eat processed foods with high salt content. On average, an adult consumes 8.1g of salt per day.

Meanwhile, the level of physical activity of the population is still low. Nearly 1/4 of the population (22.2%) lacks physical activity. Nearly 1/5 of the population (19.5%) is overweight, of which 2.1% are obese.

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