The life expectancy in the United States touches its lowest in decades, according to health officials.
According to a new report by The New York Times, the life expectancy for Americans is now even lower than last year's data report on the matter.
Robert Anderson, PhD, chief of mortality statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics, told The Times that this data is concerning because it shows that people are dying much younger than they should be.
“Even small declines in life expectancy of a tenth or two-tenths of a year mean that on a population level, a lot more people are dying prematurely than they really should be,” Dr. Anderson told The New York Times. “This signals a huge impact on the population in terms of increased mortality,” he added.
These results we heavily impacted by the global pandemic that took millions of lives across the world since the start of 2020.
That is no surprise after recent data gathered by The New York Times, which signals that the life expectancy numbers since 2019 have declined drastically, killing over 1 million individuals in the U.S. over the past two years.
A highlight in this report are the populations who have been impacted by these mortality rates.
According to a population health professor Dr. Steven Woolf, the Caucasian population were the group who displayed worse rates regarding life expectancy since the global pandemic went underway.
Dr. Woolf says that this could be the result of minority groups displaying more effort to not only receive vaccinations, but also following other COVID-protocols such as wearing face masks in public places.
“The white population did worse in 2021 than communities of color, besides Native American and Alaska Natives,” Dr. Steven Woolf told The New York Times. “I think that’s very telling: It reflects the greater efforts by Black and Hispanics to get vaccinated, to wear masks and take other measures to protect themselves, and the greater tendency in white populations to push back on those behaviors.”
