At the height of the COVVI-19 pandemic, the virus considerably lowered life expectancy in California.
It has been more than two years since the officials have said that the urgency of public health related to the pandemic is over. And yet, life expectancy for Californians has not completely recovered.
Today, however, the virus has been replaced by overdoses of drugs and cardiovascular disease as the main causes of the average lifespan.
A new study published in the JAMA medical journal by researchers from UCLA, Northwestern, Princeton and Virginia Commonwealth University notes that the average life expectancy for Californians in 2024 was almost a year less than in 2019. The 0.86 -year -old deficit of signals that were only two -thirds.
Using the mortality data of complete death files in California and estimates of the population of the American Community Survey, the researchers calculated the annual life expectancy from 2019 to 2024, decomposing the figures by race, ethnic, income and cause of death.
Although the COVVI-19 virus was the main factor in the decline in life expectancy during the peak of the pandemic, representing 61.6% of the gap of life expectancy, its impact has decreased considerably. In 2024, COVVI -19 represents only 12.8% of the gap of life expectancy compared to 2019, while drug overdoses and cardiovascular diseases contributed to more – 19.8% and 16.3%, respectively.
For black and Hispanic Californians, the recovery was even slower. Life expectancy for black residents in 2024 remained 1.48 years below the 2019 levels, while for Hispanic residents, it was 1.44 years below. On the other hand, the gap for white residents was 0.63 years, and for Asian residents, who have the highest life expectancy of the State at 85.51, it was 1.06 years. Overall, the life expectancy of black Californians in 2024 was less than 73.5 years, more than a dozen years less than that of Asian Californians.
Janet Currie, co-author of the study and professor at Princeton University, noted that these disparities are particularly striking. “You have seen the great success that the Hispanics and the Blacks have taken during the pandemic,” she said, “but you also see that blacks in particular are still not caught.” She added that although the Hispanic populations have seen a faster rebound, they also remain.
The disparities based on income in life expectancy persist in a brutal form. The Californians living in the weakest census sectors (the lower quartile) experienced a difference of 0.99 years in 2024 compared to 2019, while those in the highest income quartile had a slightly smaller gap of 0.85 years. However, the overall difference in life expectancy between these groups, 5.77 years, was almost identical to the prepondemic gap of 5.63 years, which suggests that income -based health disparities persist while pandemic impacts are recovering.
The study highlights medication overdoses as the main post-pandemic emergency engine of a reduced life expectancy. Black Californians and residents of low -income areas were particularly affected. In 2023, drug overdoses contributed almost a full year (0.99 years) to the life expectancy deficit for black Californians and more than half an (0.52) for residents of low-income areas.
That said, there are signs that national and national efforts to combat the overdose crisis can give early results. The number for black Californians decreased to 0.55 years in 2024 when it decreased to 0.26 years for residents of low -income areas; In the same time, the number on the scale of the state went from 0.4 years to 0.17 years.
Currie awarded the sharp increase in death by overdose in part to the pandemic itself; There have been disturbances in access to treatment and many Californians have undergone greater isolation. Although she welcomes recent progress, she warned that the share of deaths attributable to overdoses remains high and stressed that it was “one of the real bad consequences of the pandemic”.
Meanwhile, cardiovascular disease is now the main contributor to loss of life expectancy among high -income Californians. In 2024, he represented 0.22 years of the richest quartile gap, more than COVID-19 to 0.10 years. The authors note that this is consistent with the rise in the state of obesity rates, which can play a role.
Tyler Evans, chief physician and chief Exercise of Wellness Equity Alliance as well as the author of the book “Pandremics, Poverty, and Politics: Decoding the Social and Political Motors of the Pandemies of the Covid-9 plague”, underlined the way in which the exacerbated pandemic of exacerbated health. “These chronic health inequalities were still amplified as a result of the pandemic,” he said. Although investments in the social determinants of health initially helped to mitigate some of the worst results, it added: “funding has been dried up”, which makes recovery more difficult for communities already at risk of poor results.
Evans also underlined a broader scheme of health crises that overlap that he described as a “syndemic”, a convergence of epidemics such as dependence, chronic diseases and poor access to care that interacts to worsen the results for historically marginalized populations. “Until we invest in this type of foundation in the long term, the figures will continue to drop,” he said. “California should be a leader in the results of improving health in the country, and not a state that continues to have our drop in survival.”
Although the results are limited to California and on the basis of the preliminary data of 2024, the study gives an early overview of post-country-country mortality trends before the national data of life expectancy of the centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which should be published later this year. California, which houses an eighth of the American population, gives a precious overview of the way in which racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities continue to shape public health.
In the end, the study underlines how, although the most visible impacts of COVID-19 can have faded, their training effects, aggravated by current structural inequalities, continue to shape life and death in California. The pandemic may have accelerated for long -standing public health challenges, and recovery, the study clearly indicates, has been uneven and incomplete.
Currie warned that new discounts on Medicaid and public hospitals could worsen these shortcomings. “We know what to do. We just don’t do it, ”she said.
