Life Expectancy in US Declined in 2021. Many High-Income Nations Saw It Recover.

Just over a Month into year three of the Covid-19 pandemic, research revealed Thursday that life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2021 — which followed a well-documented dropIn 2020, and contrasted with a recovery trend for other high-income nations.

The paper, which is not yet peer-reviewed, shows that the U.S. life expectancy has fallen from 78.86 in 2019 to 76.99 in 2020 and 76.60 in 2021, a net loss in life expectancy of 2.26 years.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 toGallup 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 reportedCovid-19 claimed nearly 16%, or 984,571, of the six million deaths worldwide as of Thursday afternoon.

Dr. Steven Woolf, coauthor of the new study and director Emeritus of Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University is Dr. 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 noted that although the death toll from the United States was high due to the Omicron and Delta variants, these mutations also had an impact on other countries, which saw their life expectancy rates rise 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. This was confirmed by our research. However, there was an interesting twist in 2021. The only decline in life expectancy was in whites. 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.”

Laudan Aron is a senior fellow at The Urban Institute and co-author. 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 the pandemic is a sign that it is time to establish a national program that treats health care as a fundamental human right and reaches communities that have been unfairly excluded from the 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 — announcedHis panel will hold a similar hearing in 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.”

After a March study, the new research is now available. publishedIn the journal Review of Population and Development, 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:

The changes in life expectancy between 2020 and 2021 in America, Europe and a few other countries has received a lot of attention. The results presented here confirm many key conclusions from previous analyses. They include the large mortality impact of pandemic (1) in the United States relative the other high-income nations of Western Europe, (2) in Russia relative the rest of Europe, and, last but not least, (3) in some Central American and South American countries.

Preliminary estimates for the 2021 changes in life expectancy were also presented using Covid-19 death reports from the end of 2021 and their relationship to excess deaths. These results show a growing gap between Western European nations and the United States. The United States has seen life expectancy continue to decline and Russia is likely to see it decline even more in 2021 than 2020.

Writing about Heuveline’s findings Thursday for World Socialist Web SiteEvan 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.”

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