The New York Times (2/18, Tavernise, Goodnough) reports “life expectancy in the United States fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020, the federal government reported on Thursday, the largest drop since World War II and a grim measure of the deadly consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.” The new data give “the first full picture of the pandemic’s effect on American life spans, which dropped to 77.8 years from 78.8 years in 2019.” The data “also showed a deepening of racial and ethnic disparities: Life expectancy of the Black population declined by 2.7 years in the first half of 2020, slicing away 20 years of gains.”
The Washington Post (2/17, A1, Bernstein) reports “Americans can now expect to live as long as they did in 2006, according to the provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a part of the” CDC. Latinos lost 1.9 years of life expectancy, and white Americans lost 0.8 years, the data show. Bloomberg (2/18, Tanzi) says the report showed the gap in life expectancy “between the sexes rose to 5.4 years, the most in more than two decades.” Also reporting are the Wall Street Journal (2/18, Adamy, Subscription Publication), USA Today (2/18, Rodriguez), Reuters (2/18, Mishra, Chander), CNN (2/18, McPhillips), STAT (2/18), and Axios (2/18, Falconer).
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— “Sabrina Tavernise and Abby Goodnough “Sabrina Tavernise and Abby Goodnough, The New York Times, February 18, 2021