Life Expectancy at Birth in 2020: One Simple Number for COVID-Deniers

By Clive Riddle, July 23, 2021

Deniers of COVID-19's impact - sadly numbering in the millions - posted on social media in droves during the past year that COVID-19 deaths were vastly overstated because they were attributed to other actual causes of death. Countless reports on excess mortality due to COVID-19 have been dismissed by deniers as wonky number manipulation.

Perhaps the CDC’s NVSS Vital Statistics Rapid Release this month of Provisional Life Expectancy Estimates for 2020 will put things into simpler terms for such skeptics. The overall average life expectancy at birth for Americans has gone down. Life expectancy has been tracked as a statistic beyond our lifetimes, and the NVSS report has been released decades before anyone heard of COVID-19. And the report tells us that “in 2020, life expectancy at birth for the total U.S. population was 77.3 years, declining by 1.5 years from 78.8 in 2019.”

Robert Anderson, the Chief of Mortality Statistics at CDC's National Center for Health Statistics states "This is a huge decline. You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this." We downloaded the CDC historical data table for 1900-2018, and added in the new 2020 figure to produce this post-World War II chart:

Charts produced in the Rapid Release report also succinctly tell two main messages behind this drop in life expectancy: the cause of the drop (COVID-19) and the disparities of the drop (for minorities). With regard to the cause:

And with respect to changes in life expectancy by race: