American life expectancy declined, mostly due to COVID-19

For years I’ve used a certain phrase in presentations. It came up when I was describing modern demographics. I would explain how lifespans have increased in developed nations, and that more people will live longer, and then want on to explain what this meant for higher education. Then I’d pause and mention that this was likely to keep happening, unless something truly extraordinary happened. Like, say, a plague.

Now we’re in the second year of COVID-19. As I write this the pandemic has killed at least 4,109,303 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). That’s at least 607,289 dead in my country, according to its Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In India the official statistics may be grossly wrong, with the actual death rate for that nation being nearly as high as the published global number, according to a new study.

This horror now appears in demographic data. The CDC just reported that “[i]n 2020, life expectancy at birth for the total U.S. population was 77.3 years, declining by 1.5 years from 78.8 in 2019.”

More: “U.S. life expectancy at birth for 2020, based on nearly final data, was 77.3 years, the lowest it has been since 2003.”

What caused the downturn? COVID-19, primarily:

Mortality due to COVID-19 had, by far, the single greatest effect on the decline in life expectancy at birth between 2019 and 2020, overall, among men and women, and for the three race and Hispanic-origin…