73% of counties had more births than deaths in 2020-21, but most micropolitan areas gained people as they fled cities

Bureau of the Census map, adapted by The Rural Blog; for a larger version, click on it.

Almost three-fourths of U.S. counties had more deaths than births in 2020, a pandemic-driven phenomenon never seen before, according to data released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

"More people died than were born in 2,297 (73 percent) of the nation’s 3,143 counties between July of 2020 and July of 2021. This is the most counties to suffer such a loss in U.S. history and 60 percent more than before the Covid pandemic began two years ago," writes Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer in the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

"That's unheard of in American history," Johnson told Fredrick Kunkle of The Washington Post. He wrote for Carsey that nationwide, "With immigration also at a low ebb, the population grew by just 393,000—the lowest rate of annual population increase in history and the smallest numeric gain in more than 100 years."

Rural counties, which had a slight population loss from the 2010 census to the one in 2020, appeared to benefit from last year's trend. Kunkle reports, "Millions of residents traded cities for suburbs or larger suburbs for smaller ones. Many migrated farther into rural counties or resettled to second homes in vacation areas."

The Census Bureau's report reflects that: "Most of the nation’s counties – 2,063 or 65.6% – experienced positive domestic migration overall." it says. "In many cases, there was a shift from larger, more populous counties to medium and smaller ones. These patterns contributed to population increases in 1,822 counties (58.0%), while 1,313 (41.8%) lost residents, and eight (0.3%) saw no change in population."

The report didn't look at rural population, but did examine micropolitan or "micro" areas, which have population centers with 10,000 to 50,000 population: "Micro areas, up 0.2% between 2020 and 2021, grew slightly faster than U.S. metro areas, which increased by 0.1%. This is a departure from past trends when metro areas typically grew at a faster rate than micro areas. Among metro areas, 251 (65%) experienced population increases between 2020 and 2021. Of the 543 U.S. micro areas, 287 (52.9%) had population increases in 2021."

Philip Bump of The Washington Post produced maps giving the relative population changes in rural counties and overall: