This makes sense since COVID disproportionally impacts old people. If it had an even distribution, the average would be the same. So it is not really indicative of the severity of the pandemic, but on the age distribution of the death toll.
Life expectancy in the United States dropped a staggering one year during the first half of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials are reporting.
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.
“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”
Other health experts say it shows the profound impact of COVID-19, not just on deaths directly due to infection but also from heart disease, cancer and other conditions.
I am sure that the Chinese virus contributed to the decrease in the life expectancy but so has the number of murders, suicides and overdoses, which all increased.
Indubitably. The average age of death drops much more from an extra 20 year old murdered or suiciding than a 65 yr old dying of Covid. And deaths of younger people to Covid has not been much worse than a bad flu year. Covid certainly contributed, but despair and desperation added a healthy cut in the average life span in 2019.