Clarifying Misunderstanding of Life Expectancy and COVID-19.

• Date: 14 February 2022

Life expectancy, generally, is a measure of the expected future lifetime of an individual person. There are various measures of life expectancy used in different contexts, which can lead to confusion when decreases attributed to certain events--e.g., the COVID-19--pandemic, are reported. One might conclude that reports showing expected life span is a prediction of the exact number of years they can expect to live.

An example of a report subject to such misinterpretation is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics data brief, which shows that estimates of the average life expectancy of Americans decreasing by 1.8 years during 2020, primarily due to COVID-19.

Basically, there are two life expectancy measures--period life expectancy and cohort life expectancy.

LIFE EXPECTANCY MEASURES

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