US life expectancy in 2020 drops by 1.5 years due to Covid-19 pandemic

The first year of the pandemic delivered a bigger blow to American life expectancy than any year of Vietnam War, AIDS crisis or "deaths of despair" that nudged down life expectancies in mid-2010s

Life expectancy in the United States dropped the most in more than seven decades last year as Covid-19 sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to early deaths.
 

The pandemic's disproportionate toll on communities of color also widened existing gaps in life expectancy between White and Black Americans, according to estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The tally represents an extraordinarily grim accounting of an ongoing catastrophe. The first year of the pandemic delivered a bigger blow to American life expectancy than any year of the Vietnam War, the AIDS crisis or the “deaths of despair” that