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“If he was white, he wouldn’t have been at that hospital,” she said.

The statistics in the report released Wednesday laid bare the staggering toll of the pandemic, which has killed more than 600,000 Americans as it has, at times, pushed the health system to its limits.

Measuring life expectancy is not intended to precisely predict actual life spans; rather, it’s a measure of a population’s health, revealing either society-wide distress or advancement. The sheer magnitude of the drop in 2020 wiped away decades of progress.

In recent decades, life expectancy had steadily risen in the United States — until 2014, when an opioid epidemic took hold and caused the kind of decline rarely seen in developed countries. The decline flattened in 2018 and 2019.

The pandemic appears to have amplified the opioid crisis. More than 40 states have recorded increases in opioid-related deaths since the pandemic began, according to the American Medical Association.

Even if deaths from Covid-19 markedly decline in 2021, the economic and social effects will linger, especially among racial groups that were disproportionately affected, researchers have noted.

Though there have long been racial and ethnic disparities in life expectancy, the gaps had been narrowing for decades. In 1993, white Americans were expected to live 7.1 years longer than Black Americans, but the gap had been winnowed to 4.1 years in 2019.

Covid-19 did away much of that progress: White Americans are now expected to live 5.8 years longer.

As before, there remains a gender gap. Women in the United States were expected to live 80.2 years in the new figures, down from 81.4 in 2019, while men were expected to live 74.5 years, down from 76.3.