Life expectancy in the US, already trailing life expectancy in other rich countries, took a far bigger fall due to the pandemic than it did in the other rich countries. Much of the US decline was in Black and Latino life expectancy.
According to a new study conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers and published in TheBMJ, a journal of the British Medical Association, life expectancy in the US has declined to a degree not observed in other rich countries.
"A country's life expectancy is shaped by its health care system, personal health behaviors, social and economic factors, physical and social environment, and public policies," the Detroit Free Press noted in its report on the BMJ study. It quoted study author Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, saying: “The U.S. has experienced a massive decline in life expectancy in 2020 on a scale that hasn’t be seen since World War II. That’s pretty stunning and it was not experienced on that scale by other countries.”
The BMJ analysis stated:
The large number of covid-19 deaths in the US reflects not only the country’s policy choices and mishandling of the pandemic but also deeply rooted factors that have put the country at a health disadvantage for decades. For much of the public, it was the pandemic itself that drew attention to these longstanding conditions, including major deficiencies in the US healthcare and public health systems, widening social and economic inequality, and stark inequities and injustices experienced by Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous populations and other systematically marginalized and excluded groups.
According to the BMJ study, between 2018 and 2020, life expectancy in the US decreased by 1.87 years to 76.87 years. That was 8.5 times the average decrease in 16 peer countries. Life expectancy in the US decreased disproportionately among racial and ethnic minority groups between 2018 and 2020, declining by 3.88, 3.25, and 1.36 years in Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic White populations, respectively. In Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations, reductions in life expectancy were 18 and 15 times the average in peer countries, respectively."
The BMJ study's comparison countries were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Israel, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
But the study noted that "[e]ven countries with much lower per capita incomes outperform the US. According to data for 36 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the gap in life expectancy between the US and the OECD average increased from 0.9 to 2.2 years between 2010 and 2017."