On Jan. 14, 2021, researchers from the University of Southern California and Princeton reported that the COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed more than 336,000 lives in the U.S. in 2020, significantly affected life expectancy. 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.

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 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

COVID-19 appears to have eliminated many of the gains made in closing the Black-white life expectancy gap since 2006. Latinos, who have consistently experienced lower mortality than whites — a phenomenon known as the “Latino paradox” — would see their more than three-year survival advantage over whites reduced to less than one year.

Of the analyzed deaths for which race and ethnicity have been reported to the National Center for Health Statistics, 21% were Black and 22% Latino. Black and Latino Americans have experienced a disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and deaths, reflecting persistent structural inequalities that heighten risk of exposure to and death from COVID-19.

In the decades before the COVID-19 pandemic, annual improvements in U.S. life expectancy had been small but overall life expectancy had rarely declined. An exception was the annual reduction of 0.1 year for three consecutive years — 2015, 2016, and 2017 — which were attributed in part to increases in so-called “deaths of despair” among middle-aged whites related to drug overdoses, including opioids, as well as alcohol-related liver disease and suicide.

The projected pandemic-related drop in life expectancy is about 10 times as large as the declines seen in recent years.