Life expectancy for those born in the United States decreased an average of a whole year amid the coronavirus pandemic, the largest margin since World War II.
According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published Thursday, people across the racial and gender barriers in the U.S. experienced a drop in their life expectancy. The CDC describes life expectancy as the “average number of years that a group of infants would live if they were to experience throughout life.”
In 2019, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was 78.8 years. That dropped by an entire year in the first half of 2020, the lowest it’s been since 2006. The data for all of 2020 are “estimates based on provisional death counts for the months January through June, 2020.” Last year was the deadliest year in the U.S., with the country topping 3 million deaths for the first time.
“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC, according to the AP. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”
Black communities experienced the largest drop in life expectancy from 2019-2020, dropping 2.7 years, taking it from 74.7 to 72 years old, matching where life expectancy was for them 20 years ago. The Hispanic population’s life expectancy, which is the highest among races, dropped from 81.8 to 79.9, making the difference from 2019 to 2020 1.9 years. White people experienced the smallest drop in life expectancy going from 78.8 years to 78. The report did not include data on Asian and Native Americans.
“What is really quite striking in these numbers is that they only reflect the first half of the year … I would expect that these numbers would only get worse,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a health equity researcher and dean at the University of California, San Francisco.
Bibbins-Domingo noted that black and Hispanic communities throughout the country “have borne the brunt of this pandemic” because “there are stark, pre-existing health disparities in other conditions” that raise their risk of contracting and dying of COVID-19.
There are some shortcomings with the data, the CDC acknowledged. As the 2020 life expectancy data is incomplete since it is based on deaths that occurred in the first half of 2020, it does “not reflect the entirety of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.”
The dip in life expectancy of U.S. citizens is not expected to last long term given the vaccination efforts underway that will likely mitigate the long-term death toll caused by the virus that has already killed more than 490,000 people, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker.
