The Impact of COVID-19 on Life Expectancy among Asian American Subgroups

Abstract

Despite recognition of the diversity of the Asian American population, the mortality impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been limited to estimates for non-Hispanic Asian Americans in aggregate. This study provides estimates of life expectancy at birth before (2019) and during the pandemic, along with a broad set of demographic, health-related, and socioeconomic risk factors for COVID-19, for the six largest Asian American subgroups: Asian Indians, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Our study places these estimates in the context of the broader U.S. population by including the corresponding estimates for non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic Native Americans. We use data on age-specific all-cause mortality from CDC WONDER and population estimates from the 2015-2019 American Community Survey to construct life tables for each Asian subgroup by year. While losses in life expectancy during the second year of the pandemic diminished significantly among all racial/ethnic and Asian subgroups, these improvements do not compensate for the large increases in death rates in 2020. All major Asian subgroups except Japanese experienced greater losses of life in 2019-2020 as well as cumulatively (2019-2021) than Whites, with Vietnamese, Filipinos, and other South/Southeast Asians having suffered the largest declines in life expectancy among non-Hispanic Asians. Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians experienced the greatest cumulative losses across all racial/ethnic groups except Native Americans. Our findings underscore the heterogeneity of loss in life expectancy within the Asian American population while identifying some of the risk factors that likely underlie this large variation.