Many of the same underlying factors are why the US has failed to recover from Covid, according to experts. Even before the pandemic, people in the US faced the opioid epidemic, gun violence, and higher chronic disease rates than people in other rich countries. It has been the case for decades that the United States spends exorbitant amounts on health care, yet has worse health outcomes than comparable countries. The US started off with lower pre-Covid life expectancies than other rich countries like South Korea, France, and Australia. While most countries suffered hundreds of thousands of untimely deaths during the first year of Covid-19, once people began to get vaccinated, life expectancies for almost all the 21 countries either stayed the same or began to rise again, many up to their pre-pandemic levels. The June preprint found that the US was one of only two among 21 selected similar wealthy countries - along with Israel - in which life expectancy continued to decline last year. That drop pales in comparison to the three-year loss we’ve seen in the wake of Covid-19. A few years ago, US life expectancy dropped slightly, by about a month, due to an increase in deaths from various diseases, like stroke and heart failure. Yet even in that context, there were already worrisome signals for the US. “The fact we cannot translate our economic wealth into protecting our population and ensuring that everybody has a fair chance to live a long and healthy and productive life is a real failure.” Why the decline in life expectancy is so starkīefore the pandemic, global life expectancy was consistently getting higher by a few months every year. “ is one of the richest countries on the face of the planet,” said Laudan Aron, a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute and one of the co-authors of the June paper. (The preprint factored in rapid uptake of Covid-19 vaccines for older populations, so its death rate estimates are lower than the CDC’s, said Ryan Masters, a social demographer at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the preprint’s authors.)Īll estimates show that life expectancy in the US has continued to decline, even as almost all rich countries have bounced back from lower life expectancies in the first year of Covid.
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Because every estimate takes different factors into account, it’s normal that their conclusions slightly vary. The estimates for 2021 are based on provisional death rates, while data for 20 are final. And the preprint’s authors found that while other rich countries began to recover from the pandemic last year, the US has continued to decline. For white and Black Americans, it’s the lowest it has been in over 25 years. The average life expectancy for all groups has gone down since 2019, from 79 years to about 76.
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The CDC report and other recent life expectancy research show that the pandemic’s impact has been massive, and its effects may well persist for years.