ArticleAmerican journal of preventive medicine2023
Mortality by Education Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic, U.S., 2017-2020.
Article in American journal of preventive medicine, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Long Arm of Childhood Policy: Historical Schooling Laws and COVID-19 Pandemic-era Mortality.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Demographic and biosocial determinants of beneficial trends in older adult cognition in the USA and England: the role of cohort succession.International journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Assessing educational disparities in COVID-19 related excess mortality in Spain: a population register-linked mortality study.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Do education, urbanization, and green growth promote life expectancy?Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Trends and all-cause mortality associated with multimorbidity of non-communicable diseases among adults in the United States, 1999-2018: a retrospective cohort study.Epidemiology and health · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
introductionMortality disparities by SES, including education, have steadily increased in the U.S. over the past decades. This study examined whether these disparities overall and for 7 major causes of death were exacerbated in 2020, coincident with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.
methodsUsing data on 7,123,254 U.S. deaths from 2017 to 2020, age-standardized death rates and mortality rate differences per 100,000 population and rate ratios comparing least with most educated were calculated by sex and race/ethnicity.
resultsAll-cause death rates were approximately 2 times higher among adults with least than among those with most education. Disparities in all-cause mortality by educational attainment slightly increased from 2017 (rate ratio=1.97; 95% CI=1.95, 1.98; rate difference=739.9) to 2019 (rate ratio=2.04; 95% CI=2.03, 2.06; rate difference=761.3) and then greatly increased in 2020 overall (rate ratio=2.32; 95% CI=2.30, 2.33; rate difference=1,042.9) and when excluding COVID-19 deaths (rate ratio=2.27; 95% CI=2.25, 2.28; rate difference=912.3). Similar patterns occurred across race/ethnicity and sex, although Hispanic individuals had the greatest relative increase in disparities for all-cause mortality from 2019 (rate ratio=1.47; 95% CI=1.43, 1.51; rate difference=282.4) to 2020 overall (rate ratio=2.00; 95% CI=1.94, 2.06; rate difference=652.3) and when excluding COVID-19 deaths (rate ratio=1.84; 95% CI=1.79, 1.90; rate difference=458.7). Disparities in cause-specific mortality by education were generally stable from 2017 to 2019, followed by a considerable increase from 2019 to 2020 for heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disease, and unintentional injury. Among these causes of death, the relative increase in rate ratio from 2019 to 2020 was greatest for unintentional injury (24.8%; from 3.41 [95% CI=3.23, 3.60] to 4.26 [95% CI=3.99, 4.53]).
conclusionsMortality disparities by education widened in the U.S. in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further research is warranted to understand the reasons for these widened disparities.
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