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(CNN) -
Covid-19 claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States in 2020, leading to a record rise in the death rate and a drop in life expectancy of nearly two years.
This according to the final 2020 mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Life expectancy at birth fell 1.8 years in 2020, from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 years, the largest annual decline in more than 75 years, since World War II.
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The death rate, about 835 deaths per 100,000 people, increased nearly 17% since 2019, the steepest increase in more than a century since the CDC has been tracking this data.
The year-over-year increase was even more marked among racial and ethnic minorities.
Mortality rates for Hispanics grew roughly three times that of whites, and mortality rates for blacks grew roughly twice those of whites.
The death rate for Hispanic men increased nearly 43% and the death rate for black men increased 28%, while the death rate for white men increased approximately 13% since 2019.
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In 2020, death rates for black men - 1,399 deaths per 100,000 people - were higher than in any other group, while death rates for Hispanic women - 570 per 100,000 people - were the lowest.
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Overall, the difference in life expectancy between men and women increased in 2020, and women are expected to live almost six years longer than men: 79.9 years, compared to 74.2 years.
Covid-19 was the third leading cause of death overall, accounting for more than 10% of all deaths in 2020. Final CDC death data shows that Covid-19 was the underlying cause of death for 350,831 people in 2020.
Experts say that racial and ethnic disparities in death rate increases mirror those seen in the COVID-19 results.
For Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Society and Health, which has published research on recent trends in life expectancy, this inequality is a "jolt."
"We see it over and over again, generation after generation," Woolf told CNN.
"As a doctor, there is no logical reason why a person is more likely to die from a virus because of the color of their skin. It is entirely a product of what society has done."
Breakdowns of life expectancy data for racial and ethnic groups will be available soon, once the records are fully linked, Bob Anderson, the CDC's chief of mortality statistics, told CNN.
But COVID-19 disproportionately affected a much younger group of people in the Hispanic and black population, which will have a huge effect on the life expectancy of those groups.
"Changes in mortality at a younger age have a greater impact on life expectancy. There is much more potential life that can be lived at younger ages," Anderson said.
Heart disease and cancer remained the leading causes of death in 2020 and, along with COVID-19, accounted for about half of all deaths in the US during the year.
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Other leading causes include unintentional injuries, strokes, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, influenza, and pneumonia and kidney disease.
Death rates from most of these leading causes were higher in 2020 than in 2019, with death rates from diabetes increasing by nearly 15% and unintentional injuries by nearly 17%, including overdose deaths. of drugs.
Preliminary data released by the CDC showed that drug overdose deaths surpassed 100,000 annually for the first time during the 12-month period ending in April 2021.
And although deaths from diabetes have risen slightly over the past decade, it has not been nearly as dramatic as the latest increase.
Anderson said it's hard to know exactly what's driving it, but Covid-19 likely played a role.
"We know that people with diabetes are more susceptible to more serious diseases, and part of that increase could be due to COVID deaths that went undetected," he said.
"However, the rise in diabetes is more likely to be due more to care missed - people not seeing their doctors or not getting the care they need during the pandemic."
In fact, Woolf says that a large part of the 2020 high death rate was directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.
Some deaths may have been attributed to conditions exacerbated by COVID-19, and many others were due to limited access to medical care during the pandemic, he said.
Some examples are those situations in which patients were afraid to call 911 during an emergency such as a heart attack or stroke, those in which care for chronic conditions such as diabetes lapsed, or those in which the health crisis Mental was aggravated by stress or isolation.
"As big as that ratio was in 2020, (it will) be bigger in 2021," Woolf said.
"The proportion of deaths that could have been prevented in 2021 will be huge."
Death rates increased for each age group 15 years and older in 2020, according to CDC data, and life expectancy declined from preliminary estimates.
But infant mortality rates hit a record low.
There were about 542 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, about 3% less than in 2019.
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