Health|Life Expectancy in California Has Not Rebounded After Covid

If the nation’s largest state is any gauge, American life expectancy in the post-Covid era has not bounced back.

A new analysis published on Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA found that life expectancy in California not only decreased sharply in the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, it remained lower in 2024 than it was in 2019, primarily as a result of causes other than Covid.

Drug overdoses and cardiovascular disease, for example, accounted for a larger proportion of the deficit than Covid as time went on.

“I have to say, I was quite disappointed by our findings,” said Hannes Schwandt, a health economist and economic demographer at Northwestern University, who led the study.

After a pandemic, he said, researchers often expect to see the depressed life expectancy numbers shoot back up and “usually even overshoot for a few years.” That is because the viruses tend to kill the population’s older, sicker people who might have otherwise died in later years.

“Four years after the beginning of the pandemic, for the largest state in the country to still have a deficit — that’s mind-blowing,” he said. “Really quite a tragedy.”