Will U.S. Population Fall in 2021?

• Edwin S. Rubenstein
• October 20, 2020
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 1 Comment

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WILL U.S. POPULATION FALL IN 2021?
An NPG Forum Paper
by Edwin S. Rubenstein
October 2020

Three key factors determine the fluctuations in a country’s population: births, deaths, and net immigration. The coronavirus pandemic is disrupting all three in ways that could portend dramatic departures from “normal” population growth scenarios.

Every year for the past 100 years the population of the United States has grown. During most of that period, however, our birth and population growth rates have declined. Prior to the pandemic, most demographers expected this deceleration to continue for decades. A study published in The Lancet in July 2020, for example, projected that U.S. population would peak in 2062, and then start to shrink. That study was completed before COVID-19.

The last time the U.S. population shrank in size was 1918, also a pandemic year.

Here, I’ll summarize how the pandemic is altering those three variables, and the implications for U.S. population growth over the next few years.

DEATHS

Of the three variables, you would think that measuring deaths would be the most straightforward. It isn’t. Amid a pandemic it can be difficult to determine the exact cause of death, even with sophisticated diagnostic tools. So health professionals compare data for “all-cause mortality” – deaths from any cause – for pandemic months with typical deaths in those months of prior years. The difference is the “excess deaths” attributable to the pandemic.

From March 1st to August 13, 2020 there have been 200,000 more deaths than in a typical year, according to estimates from the CDC. The official COVID death count over that period came to 166,700. The disparity between these two numbers suggests that official death counts substantially understate the overall mortality effects of the virus. The larger figure includes people who died at home of non-COVID causes rather than risk hospitalization at a time when hospitals were overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. They too are victims – albeit indirectly – of the pandemic.

“I don’t know of (and wouldn’t particularly trust) any estimate of [deaths] by the ‘end of the pandemic,’ whenever that might be,” Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is quoted as saying.

Complicating the death count is evidence that COVID-19 is more than just a respiratory disease. When German researchers performed MRIs on 100 individuals, with median age of just 49, who had recovered from COVID-19, they found that 60% had heart disease.4 Researchers are still trying to figure out whether the virus directly injures the heart, or if drugs used to treat it do.

Another wrinkle: there seems to be no relation between the severity of a patient’s COVID illness and the severity of heart disease… Continue reading the full Forum paper by clicking here.

One Reply to “Will U.S. Population Fall in 2021?”

• Greeley Miklashek, MD

  October 22, 2020

  The number of increased US deaths this year is now at 300,000 by Oct. 21. As for the US population, we consume more natural resources and produce more pollution per capita than almost any other nation in the world. When our ancestors arrived in this “new world” (at least “new” to Europeans desperate to escape a massively overpopulated Europe), there were about 2M native Americans living here in a balanced, sustainable manner and producing NO POLLUTION. So, we are now about 162 times more populous and consume many times more than our share, while using the largest military in history to colonize the entire world with our resource extraction corporations. As for our current death rates, what would they be without our $4T medical care “industry”? 55% of American adults have at least one serious chronic medical condition (aka “pre-existing condition”) and so do 80% of us over 50. Stress R Us