CDC Report: Black and Hispanic People Lost Years of Life Expectancy During Covid — Triple That of Whites

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A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that life expectancy for Black and Hispanic people declined by three times as much as it did for Whites during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a report entitled “Provisional Life Expectancy Estimates for 2020,” CDC revealed that life expectancy for all Americans declined by 1.5 years in 2020, and attributed most of that decline — 74 percent — to the coronavirus pandemic.

But that decline in life expectancy was not distributed evenly, and illustrates the disparities that have been evident throughout the pandemic. Life expectancy for Hispanic people declined by 3 years, and by 2.9 years for Black Americans. For Whites, the decline was 1.2 years.

Among racial subgroups, the disparity ranged from almost four years for Hispanic men to 1.1 years for white women:

Among the six Hispanic origin -race-sex groups (Figure 4), the decrease in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 was greatest for Hispanic males, whose life expectancy declined by 3.7 years (79.0 to 75.3), followed by non-Hispanic black males with a decline of 3.3 years (71.3 to 68.0), non-Hispanic black females with a decline of 2.4 years (78.1 to 75.7), Hispanic females with a decline of 2.0 years (84.4 to 82.4), non-Hispanic white males with a decline of 1.3 years (76.3 to 75.0), and non-Hispanic white females with a decline of 1.1 years (81.3 to 80.2).

The pandemic changed the course of life expectancy trends as well:

Racial and ethnic mortality disparities in life expectancy increased in 2020. For example, the non-Hispanic white life expectancy advantage over the nonHispanic black population increased by 41.5% between 2019 (4.1) and 2020 (5.8). Life expectancy for the black population has consistently been lower than that of the white population, but the gap had been narrowing during the past three decades, from 7.1 years in 1993 to 4.1 years in 2019 (10). The last time the gap in life expectancy between the white and black populations was this large was in 1999 (10).

Conversely, the gap between the Hispanic and non-Hispanic white populations decreased by 60% between 2019 (3.0) and 2020 (1.2). The Hispanic population lost more than one-half of the mortality advantage it had experienced relative to the nonHispanic white population. Rather than a positive outcome, the narrowing of the life expectancy gap between the two populations is a stark indicator of worsening health and mortality outcomes for a population that paradoxically has been, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, able to defy expectations consistent with its disadvantaged socioeconomic profile (2,9,11).

The report also found that while Covid was the main driver of the drop in life expectancy, a sharp increase in drug overdoses also contributed to the decline.

Read the full report here.

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