Life expectancy for men in the United States declined by more than 2 years in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to death registration data from 29 countries in the U.S., Europe, and Chile.
U.S. males saw the largest reductions in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 of any group included in the analysis, which was published online this week in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
The Covid-19 pandemic was responsible for declines in life expectancy in 27 out of the 29 included countries, with men in the U.S. and Lithuania showing the largest losses—2.2 and 1.7 years, respectively.
Life expectancy reductions of more than a year were reported in 11 countries for men and 8 countries for women—including the U.S., life expectancy dropped by a year among women.
In 2020, Western European countries—including Spain, England, Italy, Belgium, and Wales—saw the largest single year declines in life expectancy since World War II.
“Although Covid-19 might be seen as a transient shock to life expectancy, the evidence of potential long-term morbidity due to long Covid and impacts of delayed care for other illnesses as well as health effects and widening inequalities stemming from the social and economic disruption of the pandemic suggest that the scars of the Covid-19 pandemic on population health may be longer lasting,” wrote researcher Jose Manuel Aburto, PhD, of the University of Oxford, U.K., and colleagues.
Last July, researchers with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported that life expectancy in the U.S. declined by 1.5 years—from 78.8 years to 77.3 years—between 2019 and 2020, with Covid-19 accounting for 75% of the single-year decline.
Life expectancy in the U.S. fell to the lowest level in almost 2 decades in 2020 and the largest declines were seen among Hispanic Americans, followed by Blacks. Hispanic males saw a single year life expectancy decline of 3.7 years in 2020, and life expectancy among Black men and women declined by 2.9 years, according to CDC analysis.
The newly published study found that the U.S., along with the Eastern European countries of Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Poland, experienced the largest Covid-19-related losses in life expectancy in 2020.
In Europe, increased mortality among people 60 years of age and older due to Covid-19 was largely responsible for the life expectancy decline, but this was not the case among males in the U.S., where the biggest declines in life expectancy occurred among men younger than age 60.
“Despite having a younger population, the USA also has higher comorbidities in these age groups, compared with European populations with greater vulnerability to Covid-19,” Aburto and colleagues wrote. “Other factors, such as those linked to unevenness in healthcare access in the working-age population and structural racism, may also help to explain the increased mortality.”
Blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. were found in a recent analysis to experience life expectancy losses due to Covid-19 in 2020 that were three times higher than losses reported nationwide.
Researchers Theresa Andrasfay of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Noreen Goldman of Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, wrote in PNAS that the Covid-19 pandemic reversed the years-long trend toward narrowing the Black-White life expectancy disparity.
“In light of the expectation that the Covid-19 pandemic will subside with the development of vaccines, treatments, and long-term behavioral changes to reduce exposure, no cohort may ever experience a reduction in life expectancy of the magnitude attributed to Covid-19 in 2020,” they wrote.
“At the same time, however, a rapid return to pre−Covid-19 life expectancy is unlikely, due to the anticipated continued presence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, long-term detrimental health impacts for those who recovered from the virus, deaths from other health conditions that were precipitated by Covid-19, and social and economic losses resulting from the pandemic.”
Aburto and colleagues noted that emerging research from low-income countries not included in their analysis, such as Brazil and Mexico, “suggest that life-expectancy losses may be even larger in these populations.”
“Losses in life expectancy are also likely to vary substantially between subgroups within countries,” they wrote. “However, a lack of data currently limits direct and more dis-aggregated comparisons across a wider range of countries, but these are urgently needed to understand the full mortality impacts of the pandemic.”
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Life expectancy among men in the United States declined by more than 2 years in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to death registration data from 29 countries in the U.S., Europe, and Chile.
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The Covid-19 pandemic was responsible for declines in life expectancy in 27 out of the 29 included countries, with males in the U.S. and Lithuania showing the largest losses—2.2 and 1.7 years, respectively.
Salynn Boyles, Contributing Writer, BreakingMED™
Funding for this research was provided by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the John Fell Fund and the European Research Council
Cat ID: 151
Topic ID: 88,151,730,933,190,926,192,927,151,928,925,934
