Anyone still in denial about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic will have a hard time explaining away the recent statistical finding that Americans’ life expectancy took a significant dip last year.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overall life expectancy dropped in the country by one year, and that was just for the first six months of 2020. The picture will almost certainly be worse when the entire 12 months have been tabulated.
A one-year drop in life expectancy might not sound so bad, but normally the needle only moves slightly from year to year. The last time this nation experienced this large of a decline was in the 1940s, when hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying in World War II.
It’s probably no coincidence either that the biggest declines in life expectancy last year were experienced by those groups that have suffered the worst toll from the virus. It dropped 1.9 years for Hispanics and a more alarming 2.7 years for Blacks.
Even as this nation exceeds the grim mark of 500,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus, there is some hope that the worst is past us. Infections, hospitalizations and deaths are down, and inoculations against the virus are rising exponentially.
It is too early to let our guard down, though. The coronavirus variants that are spreading could reverse whatever progress has been made.
