N.Y.C. Life Expectancy Dropped 4.6 Years in 2020, Officials Say

The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 caused the death rate in New York City to climb about 50 percent over the previous year, according to new data, a phenomenon not seen in nearly 200 years.

A wave of illness hit New York City, with little warning. Soon, it was sending the death rate rocketing upward.

It was 1834. New York City was just expanding its first railroad line. The penny press was flourishing. Cholera had struck. And smallpox was resurgent.

It would be nearly 200 years before another shock that seismic, when the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 caused the death rate in New York City to once again climb about 50 percent over the previous year, according to new data released Friday by the city’s health department. Additionally, life expectancy dropped citywide from 82.6 years in 2019 to 78 years in 2020, a drop of 4.6 years.

Throughout the 19th century, periodic outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, and other infectious diseases caused the city’s death rate to surge. But by the early 20th century, vaccines, improved sanitation and a variety of public health advances — from the disinfection of drinking water to the pasteurization of milk — had largely subdued this cycle of epidemics. The city’s death rate began to see drops and plateaus, a pattern that largely held for more than a century — until 2020.

The story of the city’s declining death rate, and how Covid upended that trend, is instantly communicated in a well-known chart published regularly by New York City’s health department, and now updated to include the first year of the pandemic.

Called “The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City,” it showed how strides in public health eventually quelled the epidemics of the 19th century. For the last century or so, the death rate — measured as the number of deaths per 1,000 residents — was relatively flat or declining, until the pandemic’s disastrous first wave in early 2020.