EMTs in Los Angeles treat a COVID-19 patient.Photo: APU GOMES/AFP via Getty
Between the nearly 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, along with a rise in drug overdoses, heart attacks and deaths from cancer and other diseases during the pandemic, life expectancy for the general U.S. population declined to 77.8 years, a level last seen in 2006.
The full-year regression is the most dramatic decline since World War II.
“This is a huge decline,” Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC,told NBC News. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we may have thought this was a virus that affected everyone equally,” Theresa Andrasfay, a researcher at the University of Southern California,told CNN. “We were aware of these longstanding health disparities, but this really drives home how the Black and Latino communities were disproportionately affected.”
The CDC report is based on preliminary data on U.S. deaths between January and July of 2020, and “do not reflect the entirety of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, or other changes in causes of death.” And with the number of COVID-19 deaths increasing significantly in the second half of 2020, the U.S. life expectancy may now be at lower levels.
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source: people.com
