Life expectancy in the United States dropped a full year in the first half of 2020, when Covid-19 swept the country, according to health data published on Thursday, a decline not seen since World War II.
Racial minorities suffered the greatest impact from January to June 2020, with black Americans losing almost three years and Hispanics losing almost two years, according to preliminary estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the data for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, in the 1940s, to find such a decline.”
Life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average, if mortality rates remain the same.
Provisional life expectancy in the first half of 2020 was at its lowest level since 2006, CDC data found.
In the first half of the year, life expectancy for Americans in general was 77.8 years, down from a year of 78.8 in 2019. For men, the average life expectancy was 75.1 years, and for women, who tend to have a higher life expectancy, was 80.5 years old, a slight drop from the previous year.
It is already known that 2020 was the deadliest year in the history of the United States, with deaths reaching 3 million for the first time. Most are due to Covid-19, which has claimed the lives of more than 490,000 Americans since the pandemic began – the highest death toll in the world.
Health experts say the data show the impact of coronavirus, but also more broadly, deaths from heart disease, cancer and other serious health conditions.
Hispanics in the U.S. have had the longest life expectancies for a long time, and Thursday’s data shows they still do. Blacks’ life expectancy, however, is now six years behind whites, reversing a trend that brought numbers closer.
Between 2019 and the first half of 2020, life expectancy decreased 2.7 years for blacks, from 74.7 to 72. It fell 1.9 years for Hispanics from 81.8 to 79.9, and 0.8 for whites, to 78. The preliminary report did not analyze trends for Asians or Native Americans.
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“Black and Hispanic communities across the United States have borne the brunt of this pandemic,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a health equity researcher and dean at the University of California, San Francisco.
They are more likely to be on the front lines, low-paying jobs and “there are stark and pre-existing health disparities in other conditions” that increase the risk of dying from Covid-19, she said. More needs to be done to distribute vaccines equitably and better protect minorities from infection, she added.
In a bleak warning for the future, the CDC noted that the data reflects only the deaths that occurred during the first six months of 2020 and does not yet show the full impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It also took into account an increase in deaths due to drug overdoses.
Dr Otis Brawley, a cancer specialist and professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, said the drop in life expectancy is further evidence of “our inadequate treatment of the pandemic”.
“We have been devastated by the coronavirus more than any other country. We are 4% of the world population, more than 20% of deaths by coronavirus in the world,” he added.
