Drop in Life Expectancy 'Speaks Volumes' About How US Handled Covid
JESSICA CORBETT
for Common Dreams
The
paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, shows that U.S. life expectancy
fell from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 years in 2020 and 76.60 years in 2021, a
net loss of 2.26 years.
The
study comes as progressives in Congress continue to fight for Medicare for All
legislation to replace the U.S. for-profit healthcare system—one in which 112
million adults struggle to afford care, according to Gallup
and West Health.
The
research also comes just days after a Poor People's Campaign analysis exposed how
the public health crisis was twice as deadly in poor counties as in wealthy
ones and "exacerbated preexisting social and economic disparities that
have long festered in the U.S."
Johns
Hopkins University's case tracker reported that
as of Thursday afternoon, Covid-19 had claimed 984,571 lives across the United
States, or nearly 16% of the more than six million deaths globally.
Dr.
Steven Woolf, co-author of the new study and director emeritus of the Center on
Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in
a statement that "we already knew that the U.S. experienced historic
losses in life expectancy in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. What wasn't
clear is what happened in 2021."
"Early in 2021, knowing an excellent vaccine was being distributed, I was hopeful that the U.S. could recover some of its historic losses," said Woolf. "But I began to worry more when I saw what happened as the year unfolded."
"Even
so, as a scientist, until I saw the data it remained an open question how U.S.
life expectancy for that year would be affected," he added. "It was
shocking to see that U.S. life expectancy, rather than having rebounded, had
dropped even further."
In
addition to examining the United States, the researchers looked at life
expectancy over the past two years in 19 "peer countries," and found
a smaller drop between 2019 and 2020—an average of 0.57 years—followed by an
average 0.28-year increase from 2020 to 2021.
"While
other high-income countries saw their life expectancy increase in 2021,
recovering about half of their losses, U.S. life expectancy continued to
fall," Woolf said. "This speaks volumes about the life consequences
of how the U.S. handled the pandemic."
Taking
aim at policymakers who opposed efforts to curb the spread of the virus, the
expert added that "in a country where the U.S. Constitution and 10th
Amendment grant public health authority to the states, I believe the U.S.
catastrophe speaks volumes about the policies and behaviors of U.S.
governors—at least some of them. A highly effective vaccine was available in
2021 that made Covid-19 deaths almost completely preventable."
Woolf
highlighted that while the Delta and Omicron variants significantly contributed
to the death toll in the United States, those mutations also impacted other
countries that saw life expectancy rates rebound last year.
"Deaths
from these variants occurred almost entirely among unvaccinated people,"
he said. "What happened in the U.S. is less about the variants than the
levels of resistance to vaccination and the public's rejection of practices,
such as masking and mandates, to reduce viral transmission."
Noting
high rates of heart disease and obesity as well as inequities in access to
healthcare in the United States, lead author and University of Colorado Boulder
sociology professor Ryan Masters said that "those same factors made the
U.S. more vulnerable than other countries to the mortality consequences of
Covid-19."
The
study states that "over the two-year period between 2019 and 2021, U.S.
Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations experienced the largest losses in
life expectancy, reflecting the legacy of systemic racism and inadequacies in
the U.S. handling of the pandemic."
Woolf
said that "sadly, it was not a surprise to see the disproportionate impact
on people of color. Our research had shown that previously. But there was an
interesting plot twist in 2021: the only decrease in life expectancy occurred
in white people. Life expectancy in the Black population even increased."
"Despite
that increase," he pointed out, "life expectancy in the Black
population remains far lower than in other groups, but the disproportionate
impact on white people holds clues to what happened in 2021."
Co-author
Laudan Aron, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told The
Washington Post, "It's hard to imagine that willingness to be
vaccinated is not a piece of that puzzle."
"The
life expectancy gap between the United States and its peer income countries is
now over five years, which is an incredible gap," she said. "Death
and life expectancy? That's the ultimate marker of what it means to live in a
country."
Some
members of Congress believe that the pandemic demonstrates the necessity of
establishing a national program that treats healthcare as a basic human right
and reaches communities that have been disproportionately excluded from and
mistreated under the existing profit-driven system.
Last
month, during the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform's first Medicare
for All hearing since the pandemic began, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) declared that
"this policy will save lives, I want to make that clear."
"I
hope this hearing will be one more step forward in our commitment to ensuring
everyone in this country, and particularly our Black, Brown, and Indigenous
communities, have the medical care they need to thrive," she said.
The
day after the House event, Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.)—a longtime Medicare for All advocate—announced that
his panel will hold a similar hearing in early May.
On
social media Friday, Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director, noted the new
paper and said that
he "can't stop thinking about how many lives could have been saved if
Congress passed Bernie's bill to require Medicare to pay all of the healthcare
bills of the uninsured and under-insured during the pandemic—which was fully
paid for by a one-time 60% wealth tax on 700 billionaires."
The
new research comes after a March study published in
the journal Population and Development Review, which found that
"global life expectancy appears to have declined by 0.92 years between
2019 and 2020 and by another 0.72 years between 2020 and 2021."
That
paper—by Patrick Heuveline of the California Center for Population Research at
the University of California, Los Angeles—concludes:
Changes
in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 in America, Europe, and a few other
countries have received copious attention. Results presented here confirm
several key takeaways from previous analyses such as the large mortality impact
of the pandemic (1) in the United States relative to other high-income nations
in Western Europe, (2) in Russia relative to the rest of Europe, and foremost,
(3) in some Central and South American nations.
Using
end-of-2021 reports of deaths attributed to Covid-19 and modeling their
relationship to excess deaths, preliminary estimates were also presented for
changes in life expectancy in 2021. These results suggest a growing gap
between, on the one hand, Western European nations and, on the other hand, the
United States, where life expectancy continued to decline, and even more so,
Russia, where it is expected to decline more in 2021 than in 2020.
Writing
about Heuveline's findings Thursday for World Socialist Web Site,
Evan Blake and Benjamin Mateus made the
case that "unlike previous pandemics, every aspect of the Covid-19
pandemic was both foreseeable and preventable, as documented by dozens of
scholarly papers, books, and even films released just since the start of the
21st century."
"At
every step of the way, the financial oligarchy and its political
representatives ensured that profits were prioritized over human lives and
well-being," they added. "To put it succinctly, the decline in life
expectancy is a concrete health measurement of the policies of social murder,
whose monetary values can be appraised by the coinciding rise in stock market
indices."
