Life expectancy is down

Life expectancy in the United States is down 1.13 years since 2019, the lowest it’s been since 2003.

A child born in the United States today is expected to live 77.48 years, more than a year less than a child born in 2019, according to a new study released by researchers from Princeton and the University of Southern California.

Declining life expectancy is not a new thing in this country. It had been dropping steadily for a few years, decreasing by 0.1 year in 2015, 2016 and 2017. That was attributed to what was called “deaths of despair,” largely increases in drug abuse, suicide and hypertension.

But, as it turns out, 400,000 COVID-19 deaths means, statistically, you’re not as likely to live as long.

“Life expectancy, a frequently used metric of population health that is typically measured as of birth, is an informative tool for examining the differential impact of COVID-19 on survival,” the study says.

Not surprisingly, it’s worse for minorities. Black people have consistently been expected to live shorter lives than white people. That gap has now increased by almost 40 percent, from 3.6 years shorter to 5 years shorter in 2020.

Latinos have always been expected to live longer than white people (“a phenomenon known as the Latino or Hispanic paradox,” the study says) but not as much now.

People of Lationo descent had a three-year life expectancy advantage on white people in 2019. That’s now down to less than one year.

And the effects on life expectancy from the coronavirus are not fully understood yet.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to bring about a greater decline in annual life expectancy than the United States has experienced in many years, perhaps since the 1918 influenza pandemic,” the study says.