An updated analysis of American COVID-19 deaths throughout 2021 highlights a continued drop in overall life expectancy as well as persistent disparities by race and ethnicity.
Lead author Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and coauthor Noreen Goldman at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs first examined the pandemic’s effect on U.S. life expectancy in October 2020. Their initial study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2021, showed that 2020 presented the largest single-year decline in life expectancy in at least 40 years and the lowest life expectancy estimated since 2003.
The updated analysis, published in PLOS ONE, indicates that U.S. life expectancy at birth decreased by 2.2 years from 78.8 in 2019 to 76.6 in 2021. The estimated decrease in life expectancy for 2021 is 0.6 years larger than the decrease observed in 2020, Andrasfay said.
“Despite the availability of effective vaccines, life expectancy continued to decline in 2021. Part of this is due to the large number of COVID-19 deaths that occurred in the beginning of 2021, before many individuals were eligible for vaccination,” she said. “But even once all adults became eligible for vaccination, many chose not to be vaccinated and even vaccinated individuals were not completely protected against the highly transmissible Delta and Omicron variants.”
The study highlighted that significant racial disparities in loss of lifespan have endured throughout the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2021, non-Latino whites lost 2 years on average, while non-Latino Blacks lost 3.5 years and Latinos lost 3.7 years of life expectancy. As noted in Andrasfay and Goldman’s previous analyses, Black and Latino Ame