“A Grim Measure of Covid’s Toll: Life Expectancy Drops Sharply in U.S.” (NYT):
American life expectancy fell by one year, to 77.8 years, in the first half of 2020.
Thursday’s data gives the first full picture of the pandemic’s effect on American expected life spans, which dropped to 77.8 years from 78.8 years in 2019. It 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 life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans, which had been narrowing, is now at six years, the widest it has been since 1998.
“I knew it was going to be large but when I saw those numbers, I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Elizabeth Arias, the federal researcher who produced the report, said of the racial disparity. Of the drop for the full population, she said, “We haven’t seen a decline of that magnitude in decades.”
The last time a pandemic caused a major decline in life expectancy was 1918, when hundreds of thousands of Americans died from the flu pandemic. Life expectancy declined by a whopping 11.8 years from 1917 to 1918, Dr. Arias said, bringing average life spans down to 39 years.
So… coronavirus was nowhere near as deadly as the last truly bad flu, yet the “scientists” in charge of life expectancy calculations apparently did not budget for even a moderately bad flu pandemic, such as 1957. They assumed that human population could be expanded from 2 billion (1920) to 8 billion (2020) without any virus evolving to take advantage of this expansion in hosts (and the hosts clustering themselves together in cities). They assumed this against a continuous stream of publications from the WHO and others that a pandemic was likely. (See Paper titled “Stockpiling Ventilators for Influenza Pandemics” for example; also Pandemic Influenza Preparedness And Response (WHO, 2009, which incidentally tells governments to do the opposite of what governments have done in response to COVID-19: don’t close borders unless you’re an island and don’t tell the general public to wear masks))
Is it possible to make these scientific conclusions, one about life expectancy and one about the likelihood of future respiratory virus pandemics, consistent somehow?
Thanks, that is useful. Wikipedia lists US WWII deaths at 405k. Our World in Data lists US COVID-19 deaths at 488k. I’ve seen numerous people on the Twitter claim that therefore COVID-19 is worse than WWII. Life expectancy has fallen 1 year due to COVID-19. Life expectancy fell 2.9 years due to WWII (according to the article). About a 3-fold difference. But, life expectancy today is about 78. Life expectancy of men in 1940 was about 61. 2.9/61 = about a 5% decrease in life expectancy due to WWII. 1/78 = about a 1% decrease in life expectancy due to COVID-19. About a 5-fold difference. So, is COVID-19 really worse than WWII?
The data appears to be just until the end of H1 2020 (wave 1), so if you factor in deaths to now, the next expectancy figures will be lower still. Maybe COVID-19 will be roughly equivalent to WWII?
Given a roughly comparable number of deaths, it is hard to imagine how life expectancy would decrease comparably in an event which mostly afflicts 20 year olds and an event which mostly afflicts 70+ year olds. COVID would have to result in many, many more deaths to compare to WWII, life expectancy-wise. And with seasonality or herd immunity or vaccine immunity or triple masking policies bringing case and hospitilization counts down, and the promise of all Americans made independent by vaccination by the fourth of July, we may be spared such a fate.
Alternate facts: “US Life Expectancy Grew in 2020 Showing Negligent Effects of China Coronavirus — US Death Rate Shows Lowest Growth in 9 Years Despite COVID Hysteria”
Year Life Expectancy Growth Rate
2021 78.99 0.080%
2020 78.93 0.080%
2019 78.87 0.080%
2018 78.81 -0.030%
source: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/us-life-expectancy-grew-2020-showing-negligent-effects-china-coronavirus-us-death-rate-shows-lowest-growth-9-years-despite-covid-hysteria/
Trump won: You do raise a good question. Do we actually know that there were more deaths in 2020 than in 2017, for example?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/provisional-tables.htm
has data through September (the Swedes got their stats for 2020 mostly done by mid-January, but the U.S. government will have a “provisional” answer by June?).
So far the answer seems to be “more deaths”. 3.165 million in the 12 months through September 2020. There were 2.814 million in 2017. The population has supposedly grown from 325 million to 330 million (or maybe 350 million if you believe Yale: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twice-as-many-undocumented-immigrants-as-previous-estimates ). So if we believe that the CDC can count deaths correctly, the rate was higher for the 12 months ending Sept 2020.
On the third hand, if a lot of the 2020 deaths were of people who were very old and/or sick, the loss in life-years might not be as large as from a year or two of driving-related deaths. We can accept that a 96-year-old with COPD and diabetes died “from COVID-19” after a positive test, but we may find that the death rate for 2020-2022, for example, is pretty close to the death rate for 2015-2017 because it will turn out that people who would have died in 2021 died in 2020.
any stats from Nigeria where population routinely takes the “Sunday to Sunday” anti malaria drug?
BTW good decision on moving off to your own blog hosting. you would not be allowed to make posts like this elsewhere.
presidentpicker: It wasn’t my decision! Harvard kicked me out saying that they didn’t want to censor anyone, but of course they had to get rid of those without a Harvard email address. They gave some examples of legit addresses, including one from Harvard Medical School. So I sent them an email from my Harvard Medical School email address and they replied that they were still going to kick me out! Discussion is good, but you wouldn’t want hate speech or coronavirus misinformation….
@philg, I am no Harvard man (neither I am an MIT man), but Harvard seemed to kick you out gently: htpp:/blogs.harvard.edu/philg is being redirected to https://philip.greenspun.com/blog so old links are preserved. But no new readers though Harvard blogs. You were the most sensible there anyhow. Their loss.
I think you’re misunderstanding how this life expectancy number is calculated. They take the probability of death for each age for the current year and integrate it over a whole lifetime to get an average. So this number basically assumes that COVID sticks around (probable) and continues to kill the same percentage of Americans as it did in 2020 (unlikely).
This full year lifespan reduction result smelled funny since only the worst hit demographics are losing < 10 life years with 10% probability, not everyone.
Your comment seemed like it swung too far the other way – surely this 77.8 number doesn’t assume covid will kill another 6-figure headcount in 2030. Besides being unlikely, that also seems like that would beg a far lower result than 77.8.
Fact check from the cdc paper linked in NYT: “The Table summarizes life expectancy by age, Hispanic origin, race, and sex. Life expectancy at birth represents the average number of years that a group of infants would live if they were to experience throughout life the age- specific death rates prevailing during a specified period. In the first half of 2020, life expectancy at birth for the total U.S. population was 77.8 years, declining by 1.0 year from 78.8”
You are correct! Wild.
I think part of the problem is that we’ve placed too much faith in #Science and ignored some very basic facts. Our science and medicine sound miraculous and absent a major shock, they seem to be miraculous. But they’re actually quite feeble – or if not feeble, at least very easily surprised — and I know that every time I strap on my mask and stand 6 feet away from someone. We’re dealing with an airborne respiratory virus with basically 19th century technology, for the most part. I’m not trying to minimize the effort and sacrifices of people trying to save lives in hospitals, but my recent experience with our science and medicine is that there are a great many things indeed that it cannot, even though we’re trying gamely. Nature does what it does and it can make problems for us a lot faster than we can solve them.
I really think most people in this country (and elsewhere in the world) back in March of last year figured that it was a slam-dunk that we’d have this whole thing solved by Thanksgiving. We have decades of belief built up around the invincibility of the power of science to save us from things that are predictable but not very appealing to plan for.
And when I say that our science and medicine are comparatively feeble against the forces of Nature, ask anyone with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) or Arachnoiditis caused by a spinal tap has to say about the relative power of all our medical science. There are a lot of people working on those disorders with the best #Science we have, and despite that, there isn’t much they can do.
Pandemics are, of course predictable, at least in large overview. When you go from 2B to 8B people and all the pathogens out there keep doing what they do, eventually one or more of them is going to find a way to really wreck our year(s).
And we also still don’t – and probably never will – know about the real origins of this virus. That’s not a conspiracy theory, that a Chinese fact.
I have a FB friend who has Arachnoiditis. She’s a wonderful woman, married with two kids and a husband she loves dearly, and she suffers from it every single day. Why does she have it? She had spinal surgery to correct scoliosis and wound up with a straighter spine but chronic nerve pain that will never go away and is resistant to every kind of treatment our #Scientists and #Doctors have been able to come up with.
“There is no cure for arachnoiditis. Treatment options for arachnoiditis are similar to those for other chronic pain conditions. Most treatments for arachnoiditis focus on relieving pain and improving symptoms that impair daily activities. Often, healthcare professionals recommend a program of pain management, physiotherapy, exercise and psychotherapy. Surgery for arachnoiditis is controversial because outcomes can be poor and can provide only short-term relief. Clinical trials of steroid injections and electrical stimulation are needed to determine whether those treatments are effective.”
We’re pretty smart, but we’re sometimes not nearly smart enough. And it always happens to someone else, or it happens during a scenario exercise around a table with Illustrious Potentates at Johns Hopkins, but when it happens in the real world, a lot of the time we suck at dealing with it.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/12062-arachnoiditis
What in the article has anything to do with “expecting,” or “budgeting for?” Seems like you’re putting words in the mouths of “life expectancy scientists.” Are they not simply calculating current life expectancy estimates based on historical data, and doing no prediction or speculation at all about what the future holds?
It would be like shaming house appraisers for not taking into account potential, future, conditions which would effect house values. It’s not what they do. Appraisers work off historic data and estimate what the house is worth at present.
Senor P: If you say that your expectation of the future is that it will look exactly like the past, I think that you might be right. Actuaries don’t usually make this assumption. See https://actuaries.asn.au/Library/Miscellaneous/2019/AccurateLifeCalculationsNovember2019.pdf and https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/methodologies/periodandcohortlifeexpectancyexplained
(they postulate an “improvement rate” of declining mortality, so presumably they should also factor in periodic viral epidemics in which humans don’t turn out to be smarter than the virus)
To ensure clean data, cant you look up the deaths for each of the past 10 years divided by population and the see if the numbers are significantly different in 2020. —Requires no speculation, no assumptions or imposition of personal values. My simple math found numbers not to be significantly different in 2020.