Will Survivors of the First Year of the Pandemic Have Lower Mortality?

The COVID-19 pandemic claimed the lives of 300,000 Americans ages 60 and over from March 2020 to March 2021. The burden was particularly heavy among the oldest adults, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with underlying health conditions who, even in the absence of COVID, have higher mortality rates than others. This brief, based on a recent paper, explores the implications of the accelerated deaths among vulnerable groups for the mortality rates of those who survived the initial year of the pandemic. In other words, since higher-mortality groups were more likely to die from COVID, to what extent will survivors have a lower mortality rate? The answer may have implications for determining life insurance and annuity premiums, as well as assessments of the f inances of Social Security – if the selection effect is large enough to substantially alter projected survivor mortality. The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section provides background on mortality and high-risk groups. The second section describes the data and methodology. The third section presents the results. The final section concludes that COVID victims were very concentrated in otherwise high-mortality populations, so the virus was quite selective. However, the number of COVID deaths was low relative to the overall population, so this selection effect leads to only modest reductions in projected mortality for survivors of the early pandemic.