4 Numbers That Make the Pandemic’s Massive Death Toll Sink In

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Elledge’s analysis covers COVID-19 deaths through early October; by then, Americans had collectively lost about 2.5 million years of life. Three months later, he estimates, the total is probably about 4.5 million.

Patrick Heuveline, a demographer at UCLA, estimates that by the end of 2020 there were enough deaths in the U.S. to lower life expectancy at birth to 77.7 years. In 2019, life expectancy was 78.8 years, which would mean a drop-off of roughly a year from 2019 to 2020, and, depending on as-yet-unavailable data about deaths last year, the drop-off could be even larger. Nothing in the past several decades, including the AIDS epidemic and the opioid crisis, has pushed life expectancy down by more than a few months from one year to the next.

The last time life expectancy was below 77.7 years was 2005. This means that, while the drop in life expectancy should be reversed in the future as the threat from COVID-19 fades, the pandemic has temporarily canceled out the gains that have been made against all other causes of death during the past 15 years.

As a metric, life expectancy is a bit unintuitive. Heuveline told me that it “results from a thought experiment: How long would a newborn be expected to live, on average, if at every age throughout her entire life she was subjected to the survival rates in this calendar year for people at that age?” In other words, life expectancy is calculated under the assumption that the conditions of a particular year will persist indefinitely.

The prospect of 2020 repeating ad infinitum is horrifying, but, thankfully, also unrealistic, so life expectancy should rebound in a matter of years. In the meantime, the 2020 drop-off captures how dramatically survival rates have fallen in the U.S.—and how nothing in recent history rivals the pandemic in this regard.

Those figures are based on an analysis from the APM Research Lab’s Color of Coronavirus project, which has calculated the death rates for other racial groups as well. Indigenous Americans have been the hardest-hit group, with one in 750 dead. For Pacific Islanders, the rate is one in 1,100; Latinos, one in 1,150; and Asian Americans, one in 1,925.

Read: The virus is showing Black people what they knew all along

In a way, these numbers actually understate the gaps between white Americans and those in other racial groups. That’s because older people are more likely than younger people to die from COVID-19, and a larger percentage of white Americans are older, compared with other racial groups. Holding all else equal, those two facts should have meant, for instance, that Black Americans would die from COVID-19 at lower rates than white Americans. Instead, the opposite is the case.

This number covers those who have lost a grandparent, parent, spouse, sibling, or child. Ashton Verdery, a sociologist at Penn State who helped come up with the estimate, told me that about 50,000 to 70,000 people in their 60s and 70s may have lost a spouse to COVID-19.

These estimates come from a model of kinship networks in the U.S. that Verdery and his collaborators built. They used that model to develop what they call a “bereavement multiplier”: At any given time, the number of mourners is roughly nine times the cumulative number of people who have died.