The 2025 County Health Rankings are out. Their current health model is in the video above. This may be the last time that the rankings are released. This is due to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s decision to discontinue funding. For this post, I will focus on pandemic life expectancies for race in the Alleghenies.
Local Life Expectancy
Last December, I posted on how African American life expectancy decreased during the first two years of the pandemic from 2020-2021. This March county health rankings released the new numbers from National Health Statistics for 2020-2022. This is the time period for the pandemic. The graph below shows the trend in African American (AA) and Caucasians from before and during the pandemic for the 14 counties in Pennsylvania with the lowest AA life expectancies. These are 3 year moving averages.
In the graph above we see a sharp decline in AA and Caucasian average life expectancies for the 14 counties in Pennsylvania with the AA lifespans below 70 in 2019-2021 relative to 2018-2020. The decline was sharper for AA’s (3.2 years) than for Caucasians (0.9 years). The graph below shows the percent change in life expectancy from 2016-2018 (before the pandemic) to 2020-2022 (the height of the pandemic). There were smaller decreases from 2019-2021 to 2020-2022.
For every one of the counties considered, the decrease in African American life expectancy was larger than the decrease in white life expectancy. Of all the counties considered for African Americans, Lawrence county had the largest decrease at 9.6 years followed by Blair county at 9.3 years. For whites, Somerset County had the largest decrease in life expectancy at 2.2 years followed by Lycoming at 2.1 years.
There are sharp declines in pandemic life expectancies for race for the counties considered. Time will tell if there is a rebound in the health for African Americans after the pandemic.
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