Covid Could Reduce US Life Expectancy Up To Three Years, Experts Say | Coronavirus

The United States could see a two to three year drop in life expectancy in 2020 due to the coronavirus, the biggest drop since World War II. Covid-19 is fast becoming the third leading cause of death in America, the Wall Street Journal reported.

In 2019, life expectancy reached 78.8 years, up 0.1 from 2018, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

The increase stems from decreasing death rates from heart disease and cancer, the leading and second leading killers in America. Drug overdose deaths have increased after falling in 2018, but suicides fell for the first time in 14 years.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, 190,519 new cases in the United States on Monday saw the number of cases exceed 18 million. As of Tuesday morning, there were 319,466 dead, including 1,696 the day before.

For comparison, in 2019, around 659,000 people died from heart disease in America and around 600,000 from cancer. The third leading cause of death, accidents, killed an estimated 173,000 people.

Vaccines are being put into use in the United States, with public figures getting vaccinated in public to encourage widespread adoption, with President-elect Joe Biden among them on Monday. Dr Anthony Fauci, the foremost public health expert, was among those due for vaccination on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, some models predict a death toll of over 500,000 deaths in the spring and over 5,000 deaths per day.

Robert Anderson, who heads the mortality statistics section of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told the Journal he had used data through August to determine that life expectancy had dropped by about 1.5 years.

“We’ve had a lot of added deaths since August, so I think a two to three year drop to 2020 isn’t out of the question,” he said.

Anderson explained that it would be the biggest decrease since 1943, when deaths from World War II caused a 2.9-year drop in life expectancy.

Twenty-five years earlier, the Spanish flu had caused an 11.8-year drop in life expectancy, Anderson said. This huge figure stems from the fact that the virus is particularly deadly for children, whose deaths have resulted in a disproportionate decline in life expectancy.

A demographer, Kenneth M Johnson of the University of New Hampshire, has reportedly said the pandemic will result in deaths exceeding births in more than 50% of US counties this year – the first time in US history. Such a reversal would come after the United States saw its lowest overall fertility rate on record in 2019.

“We have people dying and stranded hospital rooms,” Johnson said. “Who will want to have a baby?”