Life expectancy dropped substantially in NC due to COVID-19, drug overdoses

Life expectancy in North Carolina dropped 1.5 years between 2019 and 2020, according to a report released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is the largest drop in the average life expectancy the state has ever recorded, said ClarLynda Williams-DeVane, director of the NC State Center for Health Statistics

The decline seems to have disproportionately impacted Black North Carolinians, Williams-DeVane said. While white residents lost about 1.2 years, their Black counterparts lost about 2.3 years, state data showed.

In 2020, North Carolinians had an average life expectancy of 76, which puts the state slightly below the national average, 77.

The North Carolina Department of Health, which calculates life expectancy slightly differently from the CDC, calculated that the drop was closer to 1.6 years.

COVID-19 is primarily responsible for the decline, said Scott Lynch, associate director of the Duke Population Research Institute. There have been more than 24,000 COVID-related deaths in the state since the start of the pandemic.

The disparity between Black and white state residents could have been caused by the elevated deaths from COVID-19 among Black Americans, Williams-DeVane said.

“I think there are probably other factors as well that we’re still trying to understand,” she said.

Drug Overdoses

A rise in fatal drug overdoses may have also played a small role in lowering the state’s life expectancy, Williams-DeVane said.

Like most parts of the country, North Carolina saw a spike of overdoses during the pandemic. An average of nine North Carolinians died every day from a drug overdose in 2020, up 40% from 2019. Provisional data show that fatal overdoses continued to increase in 2021.

The surge is largely driven by opioids like heroin and fentanyl, though many fatal overdoses involve cocaine and methamphetamine as well.

The burden of overdoses has disproportionately worsened in indigenous and Black communities, according to state data. Overdose rates in Indigenous North Carolinians increased by 93% between 2019 and 2020.

In fact, substance use may be a symptom of the pandemic— a CDC survey sent out to Americans in Jun. 2020 found that one in ten respondents started or increased substance use because of COVID-19.

Lynch said life expectancy measures how long a theoretical group of people would live if mortality rates held constant. Because mortality rates are constantly changing, it’s best used as a long-term gauge of whether society is improving in its longevity, not how long any single person will live.

National Life Expectancy

The decline in life expectancy in North Carolina mirrors national trends.

Nationwide, life expectancy declined by 1.8 years between 2019 and 2020, which the report attributed to COVID-19 and drug overdoses.

Preliminary data released Wednesday shows that life expectancy fell even further in 2021 from 78.7 years in 2019 to 76 years. The final figures, which will factor in a very small number of deaths that have not yet been included, will be released in December.

South Carolina saw a two-year decline since 2019, bringing the average life expectancy to 74.8 years in 2021, one of the lowest in the country.

These yearly declines differ with longer term trends.

Life expectancy had been slowly climbing over the last century in the United States until around 2016, Lynch said. That’s when “deaths of despair”— like suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism — skyrocketed and put life expectancy on the gradual decline.

The drop in life expectancy during the pandemic is unlike anything demographers have seen in over a decade. This is the lowest life expectancy has been since 1996.

The United State’s large population usually means that life expectancy is not impacted by sporadic incidents like the Iraq War, which killed about 5,000 Americans.

The fact that the life expectancy dropped by more than a year underscores how deadly the pandemic was, Lynch said. More than a million people have died from COVID-19 to date.

The only incident that might have had a comparable impact on life expectancy was the 1918 influenza pandemic, he said.

“A year-and-a-half is a massive drop,” he said.