Life Expectancy has started to rise after the effects of covid

By Cam Lewis, 2025

Published 11/30/2023

The life expectancy of Americans has finally started rebounding from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic but we still have a ways to go. In 2022, the life expectancy increased by 1.1 years which brought the overall life expectancy to 77.5 years of age. This increase is great but it is only half of the 2.4 years in life expectancy that we lost from 2019 to 2021 during the pandemic. The New York Times interviewed Eileen Crimmins, an expert in demography and gerontology. She said, “We’re halfway back to what we lost…But we certainly have a very long ways to go before we get to where life expectancy should be.” 

Over the past century, life expectancy has been climbing. In 1900 it was only 47 years compared to the almost 79 years right before the pandemic. This increase is mostly due to the decline in infant mortality over the last 100 years. However, the gains in life expectancy in the US have been slowing in recent decades, in the 2010's we experienced a flattened number. Many experts have blamed the pause on gaps in health care access, areas of deep poverty, risky behaviors like gun ownership and unhealthy physical and social conditions in the United States.

There have also been long standing gaps in life expectancy between genders, during the pandemic, statistically men had a higher mortality rate than women in the pandemic years. In 2021, women were expected to live 6 years longer than men however that gap closed slightly to 5.4 years in 2022. There have also been gaps in life expectancy based on ethnicity. White people, for example, were living nearly 10 years longer on average than Native Americans and Alaska Natives, whose lives were ruined by the pandemic and have faced health problems caused by the large amount of poverty, discrimination and underfunding for health care services. Differences in life expectancy can be seen for other races, the life expectancy for Black people was 72.8 years in 2022, compared with 80 years among Hispanic people and 84.5 years among Asian people according to the CDC.

The United States has been falling behind in our life expectancy over the past decades but experts explain that the recovery from the loss of life is more major than just the pandemic.