![]() They are more likely to rent their homes, have lower education, make less money, live in polluted neighborhoods and not hold employer-sponsored health insurance. Melissa Creary, assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, worries that Black Americans in particular will continue to be disproportionately affected by the pandemic in the long term.īlack Americans are already more likely than white Americans to face barriers created by social determinants of health. “But the scale of the difference was horrific,” he said. This means the reductions in life expectancy among Hispanic Americans and Black Americans are 18 and 15 times lower than peer country averages. Historically, life expectancy for Hispanic Americans has been a couple years higher than white Americans, but the gap nearly closed in 2020. Black women have a life expectancy at birth of 75.3 years, which is lower than white women at 80 years and Hispanic women at 81.4 years. As of 2020, Hispanic men have the second-lowest life expectancy at birth, at 74.5 years, which closely follows the 74.7 years for white men. fell to just under 68 years, its lowest level since 1998. Life expectancy for Black men living in the U.S. But the new study found that those gains were effectively erased during the pandemic. has made progress over the past two decades in shrinking the gap in life expectancy between Black and white Americans. that we outlined in 2013 were on full display during the pandemic, and the systemic issues that cause them are still in place,” Woolf said. ![]() Social determinants of health rooted in inequity - including poverty, where a person lives, to which types of food they have access and their education - were also hugely important factors in a person’s health, especially among nonwhite Americans. “Things like affording child care are a major source of stress for people even in the middle class, and lack of good public transportation means people are sometimes commuting hours to work," Braveman said. "This isn’t to say that the lifespan of a child born last year will be shortened to these predictions, but on average, we can expect that today’s children will be affected by this experience." A system of poor healthĪccording to Paula Braveman, director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of California, San Francisco, a stark racial divide exists in American health outcomes, but poor health is a national issue. "The ripple effects of the pandemic will affect babies born in this year not only because of the immediate effects on their gestation and infancy in the height of the pandemic but because the economic and social upheaval that the pandemic is leaving in its wake will influence child development and health trajectories," Woolf said. These consequences have the power to shorten Americans’ lifespans in the coming decades, Woolf and his colleagues noted. Especially last spring, people were delaying screenings or emergency care out of fear of being exposed to Covid-19. ![]() Health Black Americans are still dying of cancer at the highest ratesĪlthough life expectancy is expected to increase in 2021, the pandemic will have lasting financial, mental and physical health consequences that will ripple far beyond 2020. Estimates of life expectancy during the Covid-19 pandemic don’t predict how long a group of people will live but rather illustrate who was most affected. Health officials calculate life expectancy at birth to better understand a country’s health over time. “The real worry is that we were essentially making no progress compared to other countries,” Woolf said. increased by 0.1 years - about 1.5 months. and other countries was really widening at that point,” Woolf said.īut in 2019, just prior to the pandemic, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. plateaued, and then entered a three-year decline in 2014. The trend continued until around 2010, when the average age of death in the U.S. Americans went from having a higher life expectancy compared to comparable nations to falling below average. But in the 1990s, the pace of longevity started to slow. “We haven’t had a decrease of that magnitude since World War II.”įollowing WWII, life expectancy in the U.S. “These are numbers we aren’t at all used to seeing in this research 0.1 years is something that normally gets attention in the field, so 3.9 years and 3.25 years and even 1.4 years is just horrible,” Woolf said.
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