Story at a glance
- Life expectancy for Hispanic, Black and white Americans all dropped during 2020.
- Hispanic and Black males were disproportionately affected by declining life expectancy rates, with both COVID-19 and unintentional injury to blame.
- Unintentional injury includes drug overdoses, which spiked during the pandemic.
Life expectancy in the U.S. fell for 2020, declining by an average of 1.5 years to 77 years compared to 2019 rates of nearly 79 years, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Experts naturally attribute this decline to the COVID-19 pandemic, which had “the single greatest effect on the decline in life expectancy at birth between 2019 and 2020” across all racial and gender-based categories.
Differences persisted within various ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Over the course of 2019 to 2020, life expectancy for Hispanic Americans fell by three years to 79 years from 82 years.
Black American populations saw their life expectancy decline as well by 2.9 years, shifting to 72 years from 75.
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Non-Hispanic white Americans saw similar decreases in expected years alive, falling to 78 years from roughly 79.
Thus, while all racial categories saw decreases in life expectancy, Hispanic and Black Americans saw larger drops in life expectancy in 2020 compared to their white counterparts. This corresponds to previous literature discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated already existing racial and socioeconomic inequalities and wealth gaps.
Between men and women, men saw steeper declines in life expectancy, falling by nearly two years as opposed to women’s rates decreasing by a little over one year.
For men and women within each of the measured racial categories, Hispanic men saw the highest rate of decline for life expectancy in 2020, losing nearly four years. Other notable decreases were recorded within Black American men and Black American women populations.
Outside of COVID-19 infections, which drove the declines in life expectancy across all demographics, other fatal incidents, like accidental injuries, homicides, diabetes and chronic liver diseases were also responsible for deaths contributing to the average decreases in life expectancy.
Notably, more women than men saw higher mortality rates associated with COVID-19 infection — 79.8 percent of women’s mortality incidents were attributed to COVID-19, while a smaller 68.7 percent of men’s mortality was linked to the coronavirus.
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Men saw notably higher rates of mortality in other categories, including unintentional injury, homicide and diabetes than their female counterparts. So while COVID-19 affected the bulk of mortality causes for both men and women, poor COVID-19 health outcomes appeared to affect women’s life expectancy more so than that of men’s.
The category of unintentional injury regarding mortality rates serves as a kind of catch-all, but includes drug overdoses, which spiked during the pandemic. Increases in unintentional injury were seen across all three racial demographics listed in the report.
COVID-19 hit the Hispanic American community the hardest, with the virus accounting for 90 percent of the mortality of this population between 2019 and throughout 2020.
Now, rather than leading American races in high life-expectancy rates, Hispanic populations fell further to non-Hispanic white life expectancy estimates.
“The Hispanic population lost more than one-half of the mortality advantage it had experienced relative to the non-Hispanic white population,” the CDC report says.
The research was collected by The National Center for Health Statistics and primarily used provisional death counts in 2020 for its estimates.
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