U.S. Life Expectancy Decreased By An 'Alarming' Amount During Pandemic

[appalachiablue]

Source: MSN/NBC News

Average life expectancy in the United States plummeted in 2020, widening the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other high-income countries. The decline was particularly sharp among Hispanic and Black Americans, a new study found.
Health experts anticipated life expectancy would drop during the pandemic, but how much it did came as a surprise.

"I naively thought the pandemic would not make a big difference in the gap because my thinking was that it's a global pandemic, so every country is going to take a hit," said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the new study. "What I didn't anticipate was how badly the U.S. would handle the pandemic."

The new study used data from the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Human Mortality Database to measure changes in life expectancy between 2018 and 2020 among Black, white and Hispanic Americans.

The available data did not allow the researchers to include Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian and Alaska Native populations in the comparison. The results were published Wednesday in The BMJ...

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-life-expectancy-decreased-by-an-alarming-amount-during-pandemic/ar-AALn0oL

---

Read more of the article for info. on impacts and causes...

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. The article is interesting, but it doesn't include the kinds of charts that

would be useful.

Also, given that even though we have the largest total number of deaths, mainly because we are the third most populous country in the world, and China and India's numbers are probably vastly underreported, there are 19 countries with higher deaths per million of population.

Here's an excellent site: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

You play around with what countries you want to look at, and what years you want to focus on. What I find amazing is that the 1918 influenza outbreak did noticeably impact life expectancies in a lot of countries, but those expectancies bounced back within two years. European countries also had reduced life extpectancies die to WWII, but again, they bounced back very quickly.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. It took the U.S. a year and a new administration to address this global pandemic

[Deuxcents]

3. Get a grip

600,000 plus deaths from Covid n rising.. that does not include other death from other causes.

[Warpy]

4. The 1918 flu pandemic dropped US life expectancy by 12 years

It was deadlier than Covid mostly because it hit so quickly and during wartime. There was also no way to treat it, supplemental oxygen was available in only a few hospitals in the country and there was little way to regulate the concentration a patient received.

Overcrowding, troop movements, and official mismanagement (thinking officers were too superior to catch it) all contributed to the horrific death toll.

So putting it into perspective, the maximum drop in life expectancy from Covid in the US is 3.9 years. That we didn't see the same disaster as the 1918 flu created is due to better treatment. The bungling at the top was at least as bad, if not worse.

https://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2018/05/1918-flu/