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CHICAGO – Life expectancy in the United States declined by a year and a half in 2020, largely due to the deadly coronavirus pandemic, a federal report said on Wednesday, a staggering drop that has hit Hispanics and black Americans harsher than whites.
This is the biggest drop in life expectancy in the United States since World War II.
From 2019 to 2020, Hispanics saw the biggest drop in life expectancy – three years – and black Americans have experienced a decline of 2.9 years. Whites experienced the smallest decline, 1.2 years.
The numbers may vary from year to year, providing only a glimpse over time of the general health of a population: whether an American child was born today and lived a lifetime in the conditions of 2020, this child is expected to live 77.3 years, up from 77.8 in 2019.
The last time life expectancy was so low was in 2003, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the agency that released the figures and part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Racial and ethnic disparities have persisted throughout the coronavirus pandemic, reflecting many factors, including differences in overall health and available health care between whites, Hispanics and blacks in the United States. Black and Hispanic Americans were more likely to be employed in risky and public jobs during the pandemic – bus drivers, restaurant cooks, sanitation workers – than to work from home safely on their own. laptops in white collar jobs.
They are also more often dependent on public transport, risking exposure to the coronavirus, or living in multigenerational homes and under stricter conditions that were more conducive to the spread of the virus.
Dr Mary T. Bassett, former New York City health commissioner and professor of health and human rights at Harvard University, said the numbers were devastating, but not surprising.
The coronavirus “has exposed deep racial and ethnic inequalities in access to health care, and I don’t think we’ve ever overcome them,” Dr Bassett said. “To think we’re just going to bounce off them seems a bit of wishful thinking.”
The dizzying fall in 2020, caused in large part by Covid-19, is not expected to be permanent. In 1918, the influenza pandemic wiped out 11.8 years of life expectancy for Americans, and the number rebounded completely the following year. But Elizabeth Arias, the federal researcher who produced the report, said life expectancy is not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels anytime soon.
Returning the life expectancy figures to those of 2019 would require not having “any more excess deaths from Covid, and this is already not possible in 2021,” Dr Arias said.
Beyond that, she said, the effects of the pandemic on life expectancy, especially for blacks and Latinos, could linger for years.
“If this was just the pandemic and we could take control of that and reduce the number of excessive deaths, maybe they could gain some of the losses,” Dr Arias said. But additional deaths can occur as people miss regular doctor visits for other health issues during the pandemic.
“We may see the indirect effects of the pandemic for some time to come,” she said.
Americans whose relatives and friends died during the pandemic saw their own painful losses reflected in the report.
Denise Chandler, a mother of eight who lives in Detroit and lost her husband and father to coronavirus last year, now heads one of the many black families who have suffered greatly from the pandemic – a common scenario in his community.
“I see a lot of children without fathers now and a lot of women without their husbands,” she said on Wednesday. Ms Chandler was off work for almost a year to help her children recover from their loss and even now they barely let her out for many days as they fear she will get sick and die too.
Ms Chandler points to what she described as substandard care at their neighborhood hospital where her husband, who died at 35, was treated for Covid, a facility that serves many patients in the African American community from Detroit.
“If he was white he would not have been in this hospital,” she said.
Statistics from the report released on Wednesday laid bare the staggering toll of the pandemic, which has killed more than 600,000 Americans as it has sometimes pushed the health care system to its limits.
The purpose of measuring life expectancy is not to accurately predict actual lifespans; rather, it is a measure of the health of a population, revealing either societal distress or progress. The magnitude of the decline in 2020 erased decades of progress.
Over the past several decades, life expectancy has steadily increased in the United States – until 2014, when an opioid epidemic set in and caused the kind of decline rarely seen in the United States. developed nations. The decline stabilized in 2018 and 2019.
The pandemic appears to have amplified the opioid crisis. More than 40 states have recorded an increase in opioid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to the American Medical Association.
Even if deaths from Covid-19 decline sharply in 2021, the economic and social effects will persist, especially among racial groups who have been disproportionately affected, the researchers noted.
Although racial and ethnic disparities in life expectancy have long existed, the gaps have been narrowing for decades. In 1993, white Americans were expected to live 7.1 years longer than black Americans, but the gap had narrowed to 4.1 years by 2019.
Covid-19 has wiped out much of that progress: White Americans are now expected to live 5.8 years longer.
As before, there remains a gender gap. In the United States, women are expected to live 80.2 years in the new figures, up from 81.4 in 2019, while men are expected to live 74.5 years, up from 76.3.
While the year-and-a-half decline was caused mainly by the coronavirus pandemic, accounting for 74% of the negative contribution, there were also smaller increases in unintentional injuries, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis. , homicides and diabetes.
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