Despite some recovery, Californians are living nearly a year less on average than before the pandemic, with lasting impacts seen most in lower-income and minority communities.
United States: Four years into the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, residents of California are still not living as long as before.
According to the new research published on July 9 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the state has seen life expectancy improvement, though it still has not reached the pre-pandemic levels.
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The average life expectancy in California was 80.54 years, or almost a year shorter than in 2019, when it was 81.4 years, according to The New York Times.
The decline in life expectancy in the times of the pandemic steeply declined by almost three years, and numerous specialists believed that a similar recovery would be observed soon, as the Times reported.
However, the new figures indicate that the recovery has been unsteady, and it can be linked to the pandemic only partially.
The Failure of Life Expectancy to Fully Rebound to [trend] Prepandemic Levels: 🇺🇸https://t.co/McqGDkvdnN Yearly, years of life lost (YLL) 1%? pic.twitter.com/ywrTgi3lpu
— LowCovid 🇪🇺 Kane (@falsel_net) July 11, 2025
According to the lead author Hannes Schwandt, who is a health economist at Northwestern University, “Four years after the beginning of the pandemic, for the largest state in the country to still have a deficit — that’s mind-blowing,” US News reported.
“Really quite a tragedy,” Schwandt noted.
Life expectancy is a balanced figure of the age that a newborn baby may anticipate living according to the current mortality rate.
It is not a forecast on an individual, but it provides a glimpse of the nation’s health, The Times said.
Life expectancy in the US decreased by 2.4 years, as it was 78.8 years old in 2019 and 76.4 years old in 2021. Although the nationwide statistics for the year 2024 are not present yet, the California figures provide an indication of what may be happening in the country.
To examine the life expectancy of various groups, researchers relied on statistics from the US Census Bureau and the California death records.
They discovered that places with low income recorded the largest reductions in life expectancy due to the pandemic.
However, as of 2024, the difference between the affluent and impoverished regions was so small compared with pre-pandemic times (a bit more than 5.5 years), as the Times reported.
Black and Hispanic Californians continued to experience the greatest life expectancy gaps, as voiced by The Times before the pandemic.