People of Color Are Most Affected, As US Life Expectancy Drops, Amid Pandemic.
According to new research, U.S. life expectancy decreased by 1.87 years between 2018 and 2020.
Website Science Daily reports that such a drop has not been seen since World War II.
The study was conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Colorado Boulder and the Urban Institute.
The data was released by 'The BMJ,' a journal published by the British Medical Association, on June 23.
Among people of color, the numbers were even worse.
On average, life expectancy among white Americans decreased by 1.36 years in 2020.
Among Black Americans, it decreased by 3.25 years.
Hispanic Americans' life expectancy decreased by 3.88 years.
The report also showed that the loss of life expectancy in the U.S. was 8.5 times that of the average for 16 peer countries.
For minority populations, those declines were 15 to 18 times larger than other countries.
When the pandemic came, my naïve assumption was that it would not have a big impact on the preexisting gap between the U.S. and peer countries, Steven Woolf, M.D., study lead author and director emeritus of VCU's Center on Society and Health, via Science Daily.
It was a global pandemic, and I assumed that every country would take a hit.
What I did not anticipate was how badly the U.S. would fare in the pandemic and the enormous death toll that the U.S. would experience, Steven Woolf, M.D., study lead author and director emeritus of VCU's Center on Society and Health, via Science Daily.
According to Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center, the U.S. death toll has surpassed 600,000