We can finally link life expectancy to ethnicity
Although our world seems increasingly awash with data, there are still data deserts, leading to gaps in understanding.
One big omission is that death registrations in England and Wales do not hold information on ethnicity, but an experimental analysis by the Office for National Statistics linked 2011 census records to 88% of death registrations between 2011 and 2014, with results weighted to deal with limitations in the records. It may be surprising that life expectancy at birth was lower in UK White and Mixed ethnic groups than all other self-reported ethnicities. For example, Black African women had an estimated life expectancy of 89 years (87 to 91 years), around six years more than White and Mixed ethnic women, while for Black men it was around 84 years (83 to 85), longer than most other groups.
The pattern is complex; for example, death rates from cancer were higher in White men, while circulatory disease mortality was higher in men in Bangladeshi, Indian and Mixed ethnic groups.
These “period” life expectancies are for a notional group of people who live their whole lives experiencing current mortality rates at each age, so they do not indicate how long we would expect a newborn to live, as things will not stay the same in future. But they provide a useful and intuitive measure for comparison: the estimated female Black African advantage over White women is similar to living in Kensington and Chelsea rather than Corby.
Although we should treat exact results with caution, they fit with other published research and have been partly attributed to a “healthy migrant” effect: Hispanic people in the US have around a three-year greater life expectancy than non-Hispanic White people. This overall pattern is reversed with Covid-19, with Black and south Asian ethnic groups having an increased mortality rate, while a study of 17m general practice records (DS was a co-author) found non-White ethnicity
was the biggest predictor for dying of Covid-19 rather than something else. This will reflect the risk of catching the virus, whether through occupation, living circumstances or behaviour.
• David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge. Anthony Masters is statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society