Freddie Mercury asked this, singing as if his life depended on it: Who wants to live forever? I mean: who wants to live forever? And, of course, when you put it bluntly, it sounds dramatic. But the question is tricky. Because if living forever means being confined to a nursing home, in diapers, eating mashed potatoes from the left side while drooling from the right, and with your mental faculties completely evaporated... Well, thanks, but no.

Not since the Civil War has anything like this been seen: as revealed a few days ago by Eurostat, the pandemic has reduced life expectancy in Spain by 1.6 years, which has become the European Union country with the steepest decline in this indicator, which calculates the number of years that a given population lives in a given period of time. Now a group of researchers from the Centre for Demographic Studies of the UAB have crossed the data of coronavirus infection in the State with life expectancy by Spanish provinces and have found very important differences between communities: the territories with more accumulated infection of covid-19, as the Castillas, have lost more life expectancy, while in the provinces where there has not been so much affectation, such as the Canary Islands, life expectancy has been less affected.

The coronavirus has caused the death of more than 75,000 people in Spain and has also caused the rest of Spaniards to lose years of life expectancy. In 2019 life expectancy was 84 years, but after a year of pandemic and lockdown, the figure has fallen to 82.4. That is, due to the pandemic, Spaniards' life expectancy has fallen by 1.6 years. In fact, Spain has become the EU country which has registered the most significant decline in life expectancy, according to the EU statistics office, Eurostat.