Originally published at Forbes.com on September 2, 2022.
The headline of Wednesday’s New York Times report announces, “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback,” and the just-released data from the CDC is shocking: During the second year of the pandemic, life expectancy not only didn’t recover from its 2020 drop, but it dropped further, from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 in 2020, down further to 76.1 years in 2021, based on provisional data.
What’s more, gaps among ethnic/racial groups (mostly) widened sharply.
To be sure, Hispanic and Asian-ethnicity Americans’ life expectancy remained higher than that of (non-Hispanic) white Americans, in line with general patterns in which immigrants have greater life expectancy than native born residents, though the gap for Hispanics narrowed, from 3.1 years’ greater life expectancy to only 1.3 years. (For Asian-ethnicity Americans, the gap widened slightly, from 6.8 to 7.1 years.)
However, for Black Americans, the 4 year lower life expectancy in 2019 became 5.6 years in 2021. And for American Indian/Alaskan Natives (AIAN, in CDC parlance), the drop was even worse, from a 7 year gap at 71.8 years to an 11.2 year gap at 65.2 years’ life expectancy.
To what extent, are these drops of life expectancy due to Covid-19, rather than other causes?
From 2019 to 2020, the CDC reports that 90% of the drop in Hispanic life expectancy was attributable to Covid; the corresponding rates were 68% for whites and 59% for blacks. (No breakdown was provided for the AIAN or Asian categories.) However, the CDC data splits its breakdowns into “contributions to decreases” and “contributions to increases” rather than overall net effect. Those readers who are used to looking at data and charts will expect a “waterfall” style chart; the CDC version is not this, and is not particularly helpful.
In any event, relative to the 2020 baseline, the further decreases in life expectancy during 2021 had multiple causes. Only among the White demographic group was Covid the cause of over half of the decline; unintentional injury (including overdoses) was the second-largest contributing factor and for the AIAN demographic group, worsening rates of death due to chronic liver disease and cirrhosis played almost as substantial a role.
And, finally, it is important to understand that the CDC data shows a continued improvement in life expectancy due to reductions in death due to such causes as influenza/pneumonia, COPD/emphysema, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, and perinatal conditions (infant deaths). In fact, strikingly, in 2021, heart disease was a contributor to increased life expectancy in the Black, Hispanic, and Asian demographic groups, but a contributor to decreased life expectancy for the White and AIAN groups.