According to provisional data released on February 17 by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current life expectancy of Americans is equivalent to
Black Americans and Latino Americans have been hit harder than white people, reflecting racial disparities in the pandemic, according to new analysis.
`It’s startling. This is a huge impact,` said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center for Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, who is compiling life expectancy data for all of 2020.
Life expectancy, considered a reliable measure of a country’s health, has increased steadily in the United States since the mid-20th century, with small annual decreases in recent years, mainly due to
The funeral of a man over 80 in Los Angeles, California last month.
In 2019, average life expectancy increased again as the number of fatal drug overdoses decreased slightly for the first time in 28 years.
The only good news in the new report is that life expectancy typically increases again quickly, due to the way life expectancy is calculated.
Overall, NCHS data shows that the average life expectancy for the entire US population in the first half of 2020 was 77.8 years.
Experts are not surprised by the new data because the US currently records nearly 500,000 deaths due to Covid-19.
The difference between the decline in life expectancy between whites and black and Latino groups is most alarming.
Covid-19 has devastated communities of color across America.
The data in the new study was collected from the first six months of 2020, when the virus took its heaviest toll in an outbreak through the Northeast, home to large groups of black and Latino people.
The data also reflects an overall increase in deaths from other causes, such as strokes and drug overdoses.
In a Feb. 2 report looking at full-year 2020 data, Theresa Andrasfay of the University of Southern California and Noreen Goldman of Princeton estimated that Americans’ life expectancy will decrease by 1.13 years due to the pandemic.
