Life Expectancy

Though Covid infections are trending downwards, Covid deaths remain high compared to flu-related deaths.

Life expectancy at birth

2020

Source: CDC. Notes: Life expectancy at birth is defined as how long, on average, a newborn can expect to live, if current death rates do not change. However, the actual age-specific death rate of any particular birth cohort cannot be known in advance.

Life expectancy in 2020 declined by 1.8 years – from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.0 in 2020.¹ This is the largest single-year drop in the U.S. since 1947. Mississippians have the shortest life expectancy among all Americans, at 71.9 years, as of 2020. After Mississippi, 6 more Southern states have the next shortest life expectancy (all below 74 years): WV, LA, AL, KY, AR, and TN. These same 7 Southern states also had the shortest life expectancy in 2019, and then had another 2-3 years knocked off life expectancy when the pandemic hit in 2020. In comparison, Hawaiians have the longest life expectancy at 80.7 years as of 2020, an insignificant change from 80.9 years in 2019.

While 9 of the 10 leading causes of death in 2019 remained the same in 2020, newly added Covid became the third highest cause of death in 2020, surpassed only by heart disease and cancer. Provisional 2021 data shows that life expectancy in the U.S. dropped for a second year in a row — losing 25 years of progress and reaching its lowest level (76.1) since 1996.² In comparison, studies show that peer nations had modest increases in life expectancy between 2020-2021.³

1. “Mortality in the United States, 2020”. Murphy, Kochanek, Xu, and Arias. CDC. December, 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm#Key_finding

2. “Life Expectancy in the U.S. Dropped for the Second Year in a Row in 2021. CDC. August, 2022. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220831.htm

3. “CHANGES IN LIFE EXPECTANCY BETWEEN 2019 AND 2021 IN THE UNITED STATES AND 21 PEER COUNTRIES”. Masters, Aron, and Woolf. medRxiv. June, 2022. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v4