Life expectancy in the USA by ethnicity, pre-and-post-COVID
By 
The big news in the public health statistics world last week is that life expectancy in the USA fell for the second year in a row, which is something that hadn’t happened in a century.
Overall life expectancy in the USA, pre-and-post pandemic:
2019: 78.8
2020: 77
2021: 76.1
The big drivers again were of course COVID, which supposedly accounted for half the drop between 2020 and 2021, but probably accounted for quite a bit more than half, given under-diagnosis of COVID deaths, and drug overdoses, overwhelmingly opioids, which have climbed from about 17,000 per year at the end of the 1990s to more than 100,000 last year.
With COVID official deaths likely falling from around 460,000 last year to perhaps 250,000 this year, overall life expectancy will almost certainly rise in 2022, although it will still be well below the 2019 figures.
But these overall averages, in a country as “diverse” — this is the polite term for wildly unequal — as the USA, are deceptive.
Here are life expectancy figures by ethnicity, for 2019 and 2021 respectively:
2019
Asian American: 85.7
Latino: 82.2
White: 78.9
Black: 75.3
Native American/Alaska Native: 73.1
2021:
Asian American: 83.5
Latino: 77.7
White: 76.4
Black: 70.8
Native American/Alaska Native: 65.2
There was an 18.3 year life expectancy difference between Asian Americans and Native Americans in 2021, compared to a 12.6 year gap between these two groups in 2019.
Life expectancy in the USA has been declining relative to its peer countries in the rest of the developed world for a long time now.
In 1980, life expectancy in the USA was 73.7 years, compared to 74.5 in comparable countries. By 2019 those figures were 78.8 for the USA and 82.6 for the comparable countries. The gap is going to be even bigger for last year, given that we have a lot more Freedom ™, which means a lot fewer Americans have been fully vaccinated for COVID than people in comparable countries.
But the more salient point is that life expectancy averages in the USA are very misleading. Pre-COVID, and presumably post-COVID when we eventually get there, Asian Americans and Latinos in the USA had life expectancies comparable to those seen in the rest of the developed world, while white Americans continue to fall farther behind in that regard. Meanwhile the life expectancy of Black Americans, while improving faster than that of whites, was still vastly behind averages in the developed world, while that of Native Americans was catastrophically bad.
In the context of the pandemic, the latter two figures have gotten much worse — Native Americans currently have life expectancies last seen for the population as a whole in the 1940s.
Thus in this as in so many other contexts, population-wide averages can be deceiving. And none of the figures above stratify by social class, which has massive effects independent of ethnicity, although interestingly not nearly so much in the case of Latinos, for reasons that are still not well understood.