On Jan. 14, 2021, USC and Princeton researchers reported that the COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed more than 336,000 lives in the U.S. in 2020, had significantly affected life expectancy. The researchers project that, due to the pandemic deaths last year, life expectancy at birth for Americans will shorten by 1.13 years to 77.48 years, according to their study publishedy in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The drop was the largest single-year decline in life expectancy in at least 40 years and was the lowest life expectancy estimated since 2003.