HISTORIC FAILURE

Coronavirus Pandemic Shaves an Entire Year Off American Life Expectancy

Experts say that a drop of this magnitude hasn’t been recorded since World War Two—and the decline is much, much worse among minority communities.

The United States screwed up its response to the coronavirus pandemic so badly that Americans’ life expectancy has dropped by an entire year. Estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that U.S. life expectancy—in other words, how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average—dropped from 78.8 last year down to 77.8 in the first half of 2020. “This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees life-expectancy research for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.” Otis Brawley, a public-health professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Associated Press that the dramatic drop in life expectancy is further evidence of “our mishandling of the pandemic.” Minority communities suffered, by far, the biggest impact, with Black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics almost two.