US life expectancy fell by a year and a half last year, the largest one-year decline since World War II, public health officials said yesterday.
The decrease for black and Hispanic Americans was even worse: three years.
The drop spelled out by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which health officials said is responsible for close to 74 percent of the overall life expectancy decline.
More than 3.3 million Americans died last year, far more than any other year in US history, with COVID-19 accounting for about 11 percent of those deaths.
Life expectancy among black people has not fallen so much in one year since the middle of the 1930s, during the Great Depression.
Health officials have not tracked Hispanic life expectancy for nearly as long, but last year’s decline was the largest recorded one-year drop.
The abrupt fall is “basically catastrophic,” said Mark Hayward, a University of Texas sociology professor who studies changes in US mortality.
Killers other than COVID-19 played a role. Drug overdoses pushed life expectancy down, particularly for white people, and rising homicides were a small but significant reason for the decline for black Americans, said Elizabeth Arias, the report’s lead author.
Other problems affected black and Hispanic people, including lack of access to quality healthcare, more crowded living conditions and a greater share of the population in lower-paying jobs that required them to keep working when the pandemic was at its worst, experts said.
Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live. It is a statistical snapshot of a country’s health that can be influenced by sustained trends such as obesity as well as more temporary threats like pandemics or war that might not endanger those newborns in their lifetimes.
For decades, US life expectancy was on the upswing, but that trend stalled in 2015, for several years, before hitting 78 years, 10 months in 2019. Last year, it dropped to about 77 years, 4 months, the CDC said.
COVID-19’s role varied by race and ethnicity. The virus was responsible for 90 percent of the decline in life expectancy among Hispanics, 68 percent among white people and 59 percent among black Americans, it said.
Life expectancy fell nearly two years for men, but about one year for women, widening a long-standing gap, it said.
The CDC estimated life expectancy of 74 years, 6 months for boys and 80 years, 2 months for girls.
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