You have probably read a lot about Covid-19. It has been covered extensively in the media for over 18 months now, and we have probably encountered it ourselves.
But there is one subject that I have found rarely written about, despite its importance: what effect Covid-19 will have on our long term population growth. Since I live in the United States, I will talk mostly about the United States. Notice that I am not an expert on medicine or sociology, so I am just hazarding a few guesses about a subject I consider to be surprisingly undiscussed.
As of this writing, 762,000 people have died in the United States of America due to Covid-19. The current death rate now is a little over 1,000 people a day. At the current rate, that is about 365,000 people a year. Since the population of the United States is around 330,000,000 people, that means that Covid-19 would depopulate the United States in...1,000 years.
I guess that sounds kind of underwhelming, doesn't it?
Or lets look at it another way: according to the 2020 US census, 3 states of the United States (Illinois, Mississippi and West Virginia) lost population between 2010 and 2020. But if we were to subtract the number of people who have died of Covid-19 in each state, we would find that...it is still three states that lost population. The differences in Covid-19 deaths would not change the fact that the populations of the other 47 states would have grown.
So is Covid-19 not a big deal when it comes to the large scale picture of population demographics? No, Covid-19 is still a really big deal when it comes to the overall look of how the United States will look a decade or fifty years from now, and it is just that so much else has been going on that this hasn't become a greater issue. Lets count the reasons why Covid-19 still is a really big deal:
- First, "It would take 1000 years to depopulate the US" is a silly statement. We aren't expecting a given disease that isn't found in a science-fiction book to literally wipe out a country's population. In reality, even small changes to population can have large effects.
- Second, comparing Covid-19s death toll with the census is misleading, since Covid-19 has been around for about 18 months (and is about to enter its second winter), while the census was the population change over ten years. If we extrapolate it out over seven times its current fatality rate, at least one other state (Connecticut) would have lost population, and many other states, including Rhode Island, Michigan, Missouri and New Mexico would have had their growth rate cut by at least 50%. (We don't know if Covid-19 will continue to kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, but it is not unreasonable to look at the possibility)
- Covid-19 has had an effect on people who didn't have the disease. The lack of health care due to swamped hospitals has probably killed many additional people. We also don't know whether "Long Covid" will increase death rates for years to come.
- Covid-19 has also greatly changed population in other ways. Foreign immigration will probably be curtailed greatly. People may choose to not have children, due to economic uncertainty.
- All of those are good reasons why Covid-19 will change demographics, but the most important is: even if only three of the United States' states lost population, about half of its counties did. Most of the counties in the states of the Great Plains, Mississippi River Valley, Ohio River Valley and Gulf Coast lost population between 2010 and 2020, and only population growth in the cities made those states stay slightly positive. But for most of the rural communities in those areas, that were already losing population, Covid-19 is going to accelerate population loss. Especially since these rural (and sometimes suburban areas) have a high proportion of the population that is against vaccinations, for complicated reasons. My own guess is that Covid-19 will accelerate demographic change in smaller population centers, and that they will go below a threshold at which businesses and services will leave, leading to an accelerated loop. Again, that is somewhat premature to say, but it seems a likely possibility.
It is very hard to guess at what will happen. Most demographers guess that the United States is already reaching its population peak, and that it will occur sometime around 2050. My own guess is that Covid-19 is going to change that to an earlier date, perhaps to 2040 or even 2030. It is hard to guess, because certain things, like immigration and births, might rebound after the pandemic has passed. But I think that the trajectories right now are towards population loss, and population realignment, and that the only reason it hasn't been discussed more is the fact that people are still dealing with the day-to-day existence of the pandemic.