Life expectancy in the United States dropped surprisingly one year during the first half of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials said.
Minorities have suffered the biggest impact, with black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics nearly two years, according to preliminary estimates released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like that.”
Other health experts say it shows the profound impact of Covid-19, not only on deaths directly from infections, but also from heart disease, cancer and other conditions.
“What is really impressive about these numbers is that they reflect only the first half of the year … I expected those numbers to only get worse,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a health action researcher and dean of the University of California, San Francisco .
The United States has by far the highest total confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths in the world. The death toll is almost 500,000, more than double that of Brazil, according to the runner-up, and almost 28 million cases, almost 2.5 times the number in India, according to data collected by the Johns Hopkins coronavirus research center.
Overall, the drop in life expectancy is further evidence of “our inadequate treatment of the pandemic,” said Otis Brawley, a cancer specialist and professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University.
This is the first time that the CDC has made a report on life expectancy from partial records. More death certificates from this period may still arrive.
It is already known that 2020 was the deadliest year in the history of the United States, with deaths reaching three million for the first time.
And with the coronavirus killing people of color disproportionately in the United States, racial disparities in life expectancy are expanding. White Americans live an average of six years longer than black Americans and, before the pandemic, the average number was four years, preliminary data indicate, reversing a trend that had been approaching their numbers since 1993.
Life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average. In the first half of last year, that was 77.8 years for Americans in general, less than a year from 78.8 in 2019. For men, it was 75.1 years and for women, 80.5 years.
As a group, Hispanics in the United States have had the longest lifespan and still do.
Between 2019 and the first half of 2020, life expectancy decreased 2.7 years for blacks to 72. It fell 1.9 years for Hispanics, to 79.9, and 0.8 years for whites, to 78 The preliminary report did not analyze trends for Asian or Native Americans.
“Black and Hispanic communities in the United States have been impacted by this pandemic,” said Bibbins-Domingo.
They are more likely to be on the front lines, low-paying jobs and live in crowded environments where the virus is easier to spread, and “there are stark and pre-existing health disparities in other conditions” that increase the risk of die of Covid-19, she said.
More needs to be done to distribute vaccines equitably, to improve working conditions and better protect minorities from infection and include them in economic relief measures, she added.
Johns Hopkins’ Brawley agreed, saying: “The focus really needs to be wide-spread to get adequate care for all Americans. And health care must be defined as both prevention and treatment. “
He added: “We have been devastated by the coronavirus more than any other country. We are 4% of the world population, more than 20% of coronavirus deaths in the world, ”he said.
Insufficient use of masks, initial dependence on drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, “which proved to be useless”, and other errors have meant that many Americans have died needlessly, said Brawley.
“We need to practice the basics,” like washing your hands, getting away from it and vaccinating as quickly as possible to get prevention back on track, he said.
US chief infectious disease officer Anthony Fauci has been urging Americans to observe these basic measures since the pandemic began to spread in the early spring.
But he was repeatedly undermined by then US President Donald Trump, who consciously minimized the dangers of the virus from the beginning, often predicted that Covid-19 would simply “disappear”, urged companies to remain open even when the virus spread. uncontrollably, and pushed false treatments from the podium of the White House press briefing.