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Life Expectancy Was Decimated in the U.S. Over the Past Two Years. Why?
The U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world. But our public-health outcomes relative to other industrialized nations are consistently poor: most notably, Americans have much lower life expectancy than people in most Western European countries or Japan. And over the past two years, the gap widened considerably, thanks mainly to one thing: Covid.
It’s of course not surprising that life expectancy fell sharply in 2020, when doctors were unfamiliar with the disease and how to treat it, and Americans were unvaccinated. But the striking thing, as a new study shows, is that life expectancy continued to fall in 2021, despite the fact that we had both vaccines. In 2020, life expectancy plummeted almost two full years, from 78.85 years to 76.98 years. In 2021, life expectancy fell another half year, to 76.44.
This might be written off as the inevitable consequence of what amounted to a natural disaster if other countries had seen similar declines. But they didn’t. Across 21 peer industrialized democracies, life expectancy fell just 0.55 years in 2020, and actually rose by 0.26 years in 2021. Some countries saw larger decreases than others, but on average, Covid had only a small impact on life expectancy in its first two years, which is in stark contrast to what happened to the U.S.
