The disparities in life expectancy between blacks and whites have narrowed in recent years, but these more recent numbers have reversed part of that progress.
Over the past 40 years, life expectancy has slowly increased, but has rarely decreased. Between 2014 and 2017 – a peak period for the opioid epidemic – life expectancy dropped by a third of a year, which in itself was significant.
Life expectancy estimates before 1980 were measured with less consistency, but experts told CNN that estimates of declines in life expectancy after World War II range from less than one to three years.
“A year of lost life expectancy doesn’t really give you a real sense of how serious it has been. Millions of years of life have actually been lost,” Eileen Crimmins, a professor at the University of Southern California who researched changes in mortality, told CNN . “Covid is on track to cause more deaths than cancer or heart disease, and that’s important.”
Most deaths due to Covid-19 occurred among older adults, which would have a small effect on overall life expectancy.
But Theresa Andrasfay, a researcher at the University of Southern California who published a paper on the potential impact of Covid-19 on life expectancy, notes that, although deaths among younger adults may be less common, the numbers are still substantial.
“These deaths have a significant effect on life expectancy because they contribute to more lost years of life,” she told CNN.
The disparities in lost years between blacks and Hispanics are in line with the disproportionate effect that Covid-19 had on communities of color. Hispanic and non-Hispanic blacks are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as non-Hispanic whites, according to the latest CDC data.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we may have thought that this was a virus that affected everyone equally,” said Andrasfay. “We were aware of these longstanding health disparities, but it really shows how the black and Latin communities have been disproportionately affected.”
The CDC’s new life expectancy estimates mark the first time the agency has published these figures using provisional data from death certificates that were received and processed for the first half of 2020.
Because it is based on deaths recorded between January and June, the report notes that the estimates “do not reflect the full effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, or other changes in the causes of death”.
Certain geographical areas were affected more than others at the beginning of the pandemic, and the timely reporting of deaths varies by jurisdiction.