According to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, life expectancy in the U.S. reached its largest one-year drop since World War II. Moreover, the numbers display the average. A black baby born in 2020 is expected to live for three fewer years than a Black baby born a year earlier.
The average life expectancy of a child born in the U.S. is now 77.3, down from 78.8 for those born a year earlier.
However, Black people are especially being hit by this statistic from 2019 to 2020, and the average Black life expectancy dropped from nearly 75 years to less than 72.
Life expectancy statistics are used to get an accurate concept of the community’s health rather than serving as an actual prediction of how long someone born will live.
According to the report, it shows “what would happen to a hypothetical cohort if it experienced throughout its entire life the mortality conditions of a particular period.”
The New York Times reported that this year’s numbers showed that the gap between Black and white life expectancy is the steepest it’s been in more than two decades.
Dr. Elizabeth Arias, a lead researcher on the report, told the outlet, “I knew it was going to be large, but when I saw those numbers, I was like, ‘Oh my God.”
According to health experts, these disparities emphasized in the study lead to more evidence in the theory of the disproportional effect of COVID-19 on Blacks and Latinos.
USA Today reported that Dr. Leon McDougle, president of the National Medical Association, said, “It was disturbing to see that gains that have been made for the Black community and decreasing the gap between life expectancy for African Americans and (white) Americans over the past six years had come to a halt.”
Although the life expectancy for Black, Latino, and whites had been decreasing before the pandemic, overall life expectancy has been significantly declining because of various public health issues, including the pandemic.
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Michal Engelman, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “This has been an issue of concern for a while, that we weren’t making progress and we were sliding a little bit backwards,” she said.
“After a couple of years of worrisome declines, we dropped as a country a whole year just in the first half of 2020,” she added.
