Covid-19 deaths to undo gains in US life expectancy

The leading causes were lower death rates from heart disease and cancer, the country’s no. 1 and no. Two causes of death, said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics division at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. The death rate from drug overdose rose after falling in the previous year, while the suicide death rate fell for the first time since 2005.

Last year’s low gains will be wiped out by a major longevity drop when the government releases 2020 figures next year. Mr. Anderson said he had run a simple simulation based on mortality rates through August and found that life expectancy had decreased by about 1½ years. He expects life expectancy to fall by two to three years for the entire year.

“There have been many deaths since August, so I think a two to three year decline for 2020 is not out of the question,” said Mr. Anderson. He said his figures are rough estimates and the government needs complete data to measure the exact impact of the pandemic on the US mortality rate.

A drop of that magnitude would mean the biggest drop in life expectancy since 1943, when the number of deaths during World War II pushed that figure down by 2.9 years, said Mr. Anderson. It would still be a much smaller drop than in 1918, when the so-called Spanish flu caused life expectancy to drop by 11.8 years, he said. That’s partly because, unlike Covid-19, which flu was especially deadly among children, whose mortality lowers life expectancy disproportionately.

Covid-19 is expected to be the third leading cause of death by 2020. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, more than 319,000 people died in the US on Monday. Last year, about 659,000 people died from heart disease, nearly 600,000 people from cancer, and the number of deaths from accidents – the third leading cause of death – was about 173,000, according to CDC figures. Last year, more than 2.85 million people died in the US, the highest number ever recorded.

Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said he estimates that by 2020 for the first time in US history, the pandemic will exceed the number of deaths in more than half of the US counties.

The overall fertility rate in the US fell to its lowest ever level last year and is expected to decline further as the weak economy and health problems prevent women from having children. “People are dying and hospital rooms are jammed,” said Prof. Johnson. “Who wants to have a baby?”

Prof. Johnson said based on his estimates, rural parts of the US will be hit harder by the phenomenon of deaths in excess of births. “Losing some people has a lot more impact if everyone knows everyone than in a large metropolitan area,” he said.

America made progress in lowering its death rates before the pandemic hit, and it lost some of the ground it had lost in the middle of the past decade. Last year, the death rate for non-Hispanic whites and blacks fell, while it remained roughly flat for Hispanics.

Of the top 10 leading causes of death, the number fell for seven: heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory tract disease, Alzheimer’s disease, kidney disease, influenza and pneumonia, and suicide. Rates remained roughly the same for stroke and diabetes. Flu and pneumonia were brought together in one category.

The one exception was accidental injury deaths: drug deaths helped increase that rate by 2.7%.

The only age group to see a notable increase in the death rate were people aged 35 to 44, whose death rate increased by 2.3% in 2019. Mr. Anderson said this was likely caused by drug overdose deaths.

Write to Janet Adamy at [email protected]