Lessons on Racial/Ethnic Disparities from America’s COVID-19 Pandemic

America’s COVID-19 pandemic lasted for three years. We look back at the pandemic period and discuss three lessons we learned from it. First, we present figures for the effects of the pandemic on life expectancy. We do this using a new measure, called hybrid life expectancy, which accounts for the duration of the pandemic. We show that the three-year pandemic's effects on life expectancy were around an order of magnitude smaller than previously reported. The second lesson concerns racial/ethnic disparities in the pandemic’s effects on life expectancy. Using hybrid life expectancy, we show that those disparities were never more than 0.2 years, even at age 80. Changes in COVID-19 mortality rates are examined in the third lesson. We show there that in 2021, the year when vaccines first became widely available, the mortality rates fell for non-Hispanic Asians, non-Hispanic Blacks, and Hispanics, but not for non-Hispanic Whites. This behavior of non-Hispanic Whites was a factor in the US’s comparatively large decline in life expectancy between 2020 and 2021. The paper shows how crucially the pandemic’s effect on life expectancy depends on its duration. Ignoring this duration dependence magnifies racial/ethnic disparities in life expectancy by an order of magnitude, The paper also shows the importance of social and political factors in shaping pandemic outcomes.