COVID-related deaths had a greater impact on the city’s mortality rates in 2020 than the Spanish flu pandemic had on 1918 death rates, alarming new statistics released by the city’s Department of Health revealed.
The recently compiled stats show the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the city’s 2020 mortality rate to 241.3 deaths per 100,000 population — while the mortality rate in New York City in 1918 — at the height of the flu pandemic — was 228.9 per 100,000.
As mortality rates rose, life expectancy in the city dropped in 2020 to 78 years — 4.6 years less than it was in 2019, the report said.
Overdose deaths rose 42.2% during the same time period, as fentanyl continues to ravage the city.
Between 2011 and 2020, deaths due to accidental overdose increased by 227.8%, officials said.
“The pain and trauma experienced by our city is still very real to so many of us,” Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan said in a Friday statement on the 2020 deaths.
“New Yorkers’ lifespans are falling, on top of years of relative flattening before COVID, and that cannot continue,” he asserted, calling a reversal of collapsing life expectancy rates in New York City “the great challenge of our time.”
DOH said the pandemic reversed years of progress made in helping New Yorkers live longer while exacerbating racial inequities.
Life expectancies for black New Yorkers fell to a startling 73 years in 2020 when it was 78.5 just one year earlier.
For Latinos, the number shrank to 77.3, down six years from 2019.
For white New Yorkers, life expectancy fell to 80.1, three years less than it was in 2019.
The inequalities also widened along class lines.
Between 2011 and 2020 residents in wealthier neighborhoods — like Manhattan’s Chelsea, Upper East Side, and Greenwich Village — had a life expectancy a full decade more than people living in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the Rockaways, Central Harlem, and Morrisania in the Bronx.
When adjusted for age, the 2020 death rate in areas with very high poverty was 1.8 times the rate of neighborhoods with low poverty rates.
The death rate in Brownsville was 1,282.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2020 — 3.5 times higher than it was in Greenwich Village the same year.
The DOH stats said heart disease remained the top killer in 2020 for all New Yorkers, with COVID in second and cancer in third.
But when separated by gender, the top killer for men in 2020 was COVID.
COVID was also the leading cause of premature deaths for those under 65 in 2020.
In the wake of the stunning report, Vasan said the DOH is “putting every ounce of ourselves” into increasing life expectancy in the city.