US life expectancy sees biggest decline since World War II

Life expectancy in the United States dropped by one year during the first half of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials reported Thursday. Compared to 2019, life expectancy for non-Hispanic Black people in the United States fell about three times what it did for non-Hispanic White people, by 2.7 years.

But the toll of the pandemic can not be understated with more than 347,000 dying due to COVID-19 previous year in addition to indirect pandemic deaths.

The life expectancy for the average Americans just got significantly shorter.

"Another effect of the decreased life expectancy estimates observed during the first half of 2020 was a worsening of racial and ethnic mortality disparities", the report noted.

Life expectancy in America had already shown signs of stalling in the years before the coronavirus, after rising steadily for most of the period since World War II. In the first half of last year, that was 77.8 years for Americans overall, down one year from 78.8 in 2019.

Non-Hispanic Black males experienced the highest decline in life expectancy - three years - of any race and sex subgroup in the new analysis, followed by Hispanic males (2.4 years), non-Hispanic Black females (2.3 years), and Hispanic females (1.1 years).

The report comes on the heels of preliminary figures that have suggested 2020 will be the deadliest year in US history.

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The preliminary report did not analyze life expectancy trends for Asian Americans or Native Americans.

Experts say that ethnic minority communities have borne the brunt of the pandemic, as they are more likely to work in frontline low-wage jobs and endure crowded living conditions. Conversely, the gap between Hispanic Americans and white Americans decreased by 37%, from 3 to 1.9 years, according to the report.

The pandemic has also reversed decades of effort to narrow the life expectancy gap between Black and White Americans.

Researchers from a university in Barcelona came to this grim conclusion by summing up the estimated years lost for more than 1.2 million deaths from COVID-19, in 81 different countries.

The situation is more dier for people of color. Included in those statistics are an uptick in fatal strokes and heart attacks and a record number of drug overdose deaths, 81,000 from May 2019 to May 2020. "We are 4% of the world's population, more than 20% of the world's coronavirus deaths", he said. Almost 2.5 million have passed away from COVID-19 since the beginning of 2020.

Overall, the drop in life expectancy is more evidence of "our mishandling of the pandemic", Brawley said.

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