Changes in life expectancy in the USA and other peer countries during the pandemic

This new study has some pretty startling data in regard to how the USA has handled the COVID pandemic relative to the rest of the developed world.

Numbers:

Life expectancy in the USA dropped by 1.88 years in 2020 and then by another .39 years in 2021, for a net loss of 2.27 years over the course of the epidemic.

In the peer countries, it dropped by an average of .57 years in 2020, and rebounded by .28 years in 2021, for a net loss of .29 years over the course of the epidemic.

In the USA, the demographic breakdowns in regard to the differences between the two years are particularly interesting. In 2020, the largest loss of life expectancy was among Blacks and Hispanics, but in 2021 life expectancy rose for those two groups — by .42 years for Blacks, which is actually better than the average gain in the peer countries — while dropping .34 years among non-Hispanic whites. The biggest drop last year was among non-Hispanic white males, who have now seen their life expectancy fall by more than two years over the course of the epidemic. (MAGA!)

The obvious explanation for the difference between the USA and the peer — or more properly “peer” — countries are COVID’s direct effects on mortality. But this seems far too facile. Consider a couple of comparisons. Spain and Italy have seen mortality rates from COVID that are not drastically different than that seen in the USA: as of the end of 2021, the USA’s total COVID mortality was about 10% higher than Italy’s and 40% higher than Spain’s. But the differences in changes in life expectancies between the latter two countries and the USA are far more drastic than the differences in COVID mortality: Spain has seen a net loss of .5 years of life expectancy, while Italy has seen a net loss of .7 years, meaning that the decrease in life expectancy in the USA has been 354% and 224% higher than in those two countries respectively than in the USA.

So clearly a lot more is going on here than the direct effects of the COVID pandemic on life expectancy in these various countries. At a minimum, these numbers suggest that the secondary health effects of the pandemic, or perhaps more precisely the secondary health effects of the public health measures enacted to deal with the pandemic, have been strongly positive in other developed countries, while by contrast the USA has seen far worse health effects from the pandemic, above and beyond COVID’s direct effects on mortality in this country.

ETA: Gregor Sansa points out in comments that another significant difference might be the age distribution of COVID deaths in these countries. If the age distribution of COVID deaths in the USA is skewed markedly younger, then this would of course have a much stronger effect on life expectancy. I don’t know if this is the case — COVID deaths in the USA among younger people did increase relative to COVID deaths among older people in 2021 , which was obviously a consequence of different rates of vaccination among age groups, but I don’t have the comparable figures for the peer countries.

Another way of putting this is that the excess deaths in these countries over the pre-pandemic baseline must be on net quite a bit smaller than the total number of COVID deaths, while in the USA we know that excess deaths have been significantly higher than total COVID deaths, or at least total reported COVID deaths.