Britons Gloomier, But Covid Failed To Dampen Worldwide Happiness

It claimed 6.7 million lives, locked down entire countries and triggered a global economic slump, but Covid-19 has not dampened humankind's happiness, a study has found.

- Robert Booth

Interviews with more than 100,000 people across 137 countries found significantly higher levels of benevolence in all global regions than before the pandemic. And when asked to evaluate their lives on a scale of one to 10, people on average gave scores just as high in the 2020-22 Covid years as in 2017-19.

Things were slightly worse in western countries and slightly better in the rest of the world, but overall "the undoubted pains were offset by increases in the extent to which respondents had been able to discover and share the capacity to care for each other in difficult times", the 10th World Happiness Report found.

Global measures of "misery" fell, and despite higher death tolls among elderly people, those aged over 60 on average reported improvements in happiness relative to younger groups.