Compared to other high income nations, the life expectancy numbers in the U.S. have never been great. Routinely, the numbers in the United States fall years behind nations that have actual health care systems for all citizens not just those who can afford it, nations that don’t treat workplace safety rules as something to be evaded, and nations that don’t insist on the right to be shot while buying socks. But in the last year, the United States demonstrated that it could still take the lead … in allowing people to die pointlessly during a pandemic.
In a new study published in TheBMJ, researchers looked at how the pandemic had affected life expectancy in the United States and in other high income nations. What they found was that, while every nation suffered to some degree, the United States took a massive hit. That’s particularly true for Black and Latino Americans who were both more likely to work in “essential” jobs, and more likely to have poor health care availability even before the pandemic.
None of that may be all that surprising. After all, officially the number of COVID-19 deaths stands at just over 600,000, with analysts attributing 400,000 directly to the bad decisions made by Donald Trump. More realistically, at least 900,000 have died as a result of the pandemic, easily the greatest public health disaster in a century. So a sharp, one-time hit to the numbers might be expected. But what the researchers also point out is that the U.S. was quickly losing ground to other nations even before the pandemic.
In just the eight years from 2010 to 2018, the gap between life expectancy in the United States and in other high income nations grew by 1.17 years. Average life expectancy in the U.S. stood at 78.74 years in 2018, while elsewhere it had reached 81.78 years. If that sounds bad, it’s because it is. Every year, for eight straight years, Americans lost more than a month of life when compared to the nations that are supposedly its peers.
But it gets worse.
In the period going through the first part of the pandemic—2018 to 2020—life expectancy in the U.S. actually decreased by 1.87 years, falling to 76.87 years. Other nations saw much smaller declines. That brought the average gap between the U.S. and the other nations in the survey to an astounding 4.69 years. And this, it should be noted, was before the U.S. reached the peak number of COVID-19 deaths, which wasn’t until after the start of 2021. It’s unclear what the final tallies might be at this point, but considering the loses already counted, life expectancy could easily be down two years from 2018, and five years behind other wealthy nations. That change over the course of the last two years was over 8 times greater than the pandemic effect seen in the other nations.
However, when that 1.87 year decline is mapped across racial groups, it’s clear that deaths were far from evenly distributed. White Americans saw their life expectancy drop by 1.17 years. Blacks were almost three times higher at 3.25 years. And Latinos saw life expectancy crash by 3.88 years. These big differences come not just from disproportionately higher deaths in communities of color, but from more people dying younger.
For decades, the gap between white and Black life expectancy in the U.S. had been slowly decreasing. All progress toward closing that gap was erased in the last two years. Life expectancy for Black men fell to just 67.73 years, the lowest level since the turn of the century.
None of these numbers represents a prediction for any group of individuals. Black men in their 60s should not start hearing a ticking clock just because the “expectancy” is right ahead. What these numbers represent is more of an overall measure of health for the nation as a whole. What they tell us is that America, when compared to other nations, is sick and getting sicker. And, if there was any doubt, it shows that when things get rough, Black and Latino Americans pay the greatest price.