Life expectancy in the United States dropped an incredible year during the first half of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials reported.
According to preliminary estimates released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), minorities have had the biggest impact, with black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics nearly two years.
“It’s a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees CDC numbers. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”
Other health experts say that it shows the profound impact of Covid-19, not only on deaths directly due to infection, but also due to heart disease, cancer and other conditions.
“What’s really striking about these numbers is that they only reflect the first half of the year … I would expect these numbers to only get worse,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a researcher and dean for health equity at the University of California, said. , San Francisco.
The US has by far the highest number of confirmed cases and deaths in the coronavirus in the world. According to data collected by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center, the death toll is nearly 500,000, more than twice that of Brazil in second place, and nearly 28 million cases, almost 2.5 times that of next place in In the.
Overall, the decline in life expectancy is more evidence of ‘our mismanagement of the pandemic,’ said Otis Brawley, a cancer specialist and professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University.
This is the first time the CDC has reported on life expectancy from early, partial records. More death certificates from that period may still come in.
It is already known that 2020 was the deadliest year in American history, with deaths hitting three million for the first time.
And because the coronavirus kills people of color in the U.S. excessively, racial differences in life expectancy increase. White Americans are living on average six years longer than Black Americans and before the pandemic that the average figure was four years, preliminary data indicate, reversing a trend that has brought their numbers closer since 1993.
The life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect on average. In the first half of last year, it was a total of 77.8 years for Americans, a year lower than 78.8 in 2019. For men it was 75.1 years and for women 80.5 years.
As a group, Latin Americans in the U.S. have had the longest life expectancy and still do.
Between 2019 and the first half of 2020, life expectancy for black people decreased by 2.7 years to 72. It dropped 1.9 years for Hispanics, to 79.9 and 0.8 years for white people to 78. The preliminary report did not analyze trends for the Asians. or Native Americans.
“Black and Hispanic communities across the United States have borne the brunt of this pandemic,” Bibbins-Domingo said.
They are more likely to be in the forefront, low-wage jobs and living in crowded environments where it is easier to spread the virus, and ‘there are strong, existing health disparities in other conditions’ that increase their risk of died of Covid-19, she said.
More needs to be done to distribute vaccines fairly, to improve working conditions and better protect minorities from infection, and to include them in economic mitigation measures, she added.
Johns Hopkins’s Brawley agrees, saying: ‘The focus should actually be great on getting every American adequate care. And healthcare needs to be defined as prevention as well as treatment. ”
He added: ‘We have been devastated by the coronavirus more than any other country. We are 4% of the world’s population, more than 20% of the deaths in the world’s coronavirus, ”he said.
Insufficient use of masks, early dependence on drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, ‘which proved to be worthless’, and other mistakes meant many Americans died unnecessarily, Brawley said.
“We need to practice the basics” such as hand washing, physical distance and vaccination as soon as possible to get prevention back on track, he said.
The top US infectious disease official, Anthony Fauci, has urged people in the US to take these basic measures into account since the pandemic raged early last spring.
But he was repeatedly undermined by then-US President Donald Trump, who consciously downplayed the dangers of the virus from the start, and regularly predicted that Covid-19 would just “disappear”, urging businesses to stay open, even if the virus spreads uncontrollably, and false treatments are driven off the White House podium from the White House.