Daily Times

US experienced the biggest decline since World War 2, according to data issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday. The life expectancy in the United States dropped by a year in the first half of 2020. The CDC said, it was publishing provisional data for the first time in order to assess the effect of excess deaths in 2020, while the estimates are not confirmed and do not explain the full effects of COVID 19 pandemic.

One of the authors of the CDC report, Elizabeth Arias said, “The decline in life expectancy in the first half of 2020 is an aberration from the changes in life expectancy from year to year during the past two decades”. It was the biggest drop since World War 2, when life expectancy fell 2.9 years between 1942 and 1943, she said.

The difference between the number of expected deaths and the actual number defines the excess deaths. This estimate shows the approximate number of years a child lives based on the death rate in a given period.

Americans on average are now expected to live for 77.8 years, from 78.8 years in 2019. Minorities suffered the biggest impact, with Black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics, nearly two years, according to preliminary estimates Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said, Certain age groups may have been under-represented in the data, as completion of death certificates takes longer for deaths from causes requiring investigation such as infant deaths and drug overdoses.

Marc Gourevitch, the chair of the department of population health at NYU Langone Health said, “I would expect the impact on life expectancy to persist or, more likely, to become even more pronounced as data from the second half of 2020 are factored in”.

The intense economic impact of the pandemic will blunt the speed at which life expectancy returns to pre-pandemic levels, said Gourevitch, who was not involved in the research.