I’ve seen another release about the US life expectancy dropping a year during 2020 – but this one didn’t credit Covid exclusively. It pointed out that the US Life expectancy has been dropping for several years due to an increase in drug overdoses and suicides. Please remember – causality is inferred, not statistically proven.
Covid, with most fatalities occurring among the the oldest, has a hard time reducing the life expectancy by a year. (Social Security has its work on life expectancy, going back to 1940, another table, for life expectancy at specific ages, is available at here)
The article reminded me of the drop in life expectancy that followed the end of the Soviet Union. That was credited to alcohol overdoses, violent death, and suicides. The chart shows that it happened there, so it can happen here. The thing about the calculated life expectancy is that one 21-year-old male death takes 55.91 years from the life expectancy chart, while a 75-year-old male death takes only 11.14 years from the collective pool.
The Soviet figures suggest that a major economic or governmental change can have some immediate changes – though today’s Russians, who made it through the collapse of the Soviet Union were back on track in 2019. CDC has released data showing excess US deaths in 2020, but they are by state and weekly. Hopefully they will condense the data – 50 states and 52 weeks make a spreadsheet that takes a lot of effort to get through. Summing up the data to one nation and one year will make it a lot easier to comprehend, The data that is currently available is at this link. It is interesting to look at – and I expect that they will have it compiled at a national level soon.
Trego's Mountain Ear 