The COVID-19 death toll sent U.S. life expectancy plunging in 2020
Overall U.S. life expectancy declined by a year, the biggest drop since the 1940s
Life expectancy in the United States plunged in the first half of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.
A preliminary estimate of overall U.S. life expectancy from birth finds it dropped a full year compared with 2019, from 78.8 to 77.8 years, the National Center for Health Statistics reports online February 18. It’s the largest decline in life expectancy for the United States since the early 1940s.
When broken down by race and ethnicity, stark differences in the pandemic’s toll in the United States emerge. Life expectancy for Black people fell by 2.7 years, from 74.7 in 2019 to 72 in 2020. For Hispanic people, the drop was 1.9 years, from 81.8 to 79.9. White people experienced the smallest decline, from 78.8 to 78. As a result, the gap in life expectancy between Black and white populations in the United States grew to six years, a 46 percent increase from 2019, and the largest gap since 1998.
“These racial and ethnic disparities reflect persistent structural inequalities that increase both the risk of exposure to the COVID virus and the risk of dying from COVID among those that are infected,” says Noreen Goldman, a demographer at Princeton University. Many Black and Latino Americans have worked in frontline jobs that can’t be done at home and are less likely than white Americans to have access to healthcare (SN: 7/2/20).