Amazing (and depressing) statistics


A recent Wall Street Journal article told a chilling story about how great a disaster this year has been for the American people, largely because of the current (and thankfully outgoing) administration’s terrible mismanagement of the pandemic.

The article was nominally about the CDC’s announcement that life expectancy rose in the US for 2019, to 78.8 years. But at the same time,

Last year’s slim gain will be erased by a large drop in longevity when the government releases 2020 figures next year. Mr. Anderson (Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality-statistics branch of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics) said he performed a simple simulation based on mortality figures through August and found that life expectancy had declined by about 1½ years. For the full year, he expects that life expectancy could fall by two to three years.

However, it’s not completely bad news. There have been two years when life expectancy fell more than that:

A drop of that magnitude would mark the largest decline in life expectancy since 1943, when World War II deaths pushed that metric down by 2.9 years, Mr. Anderson said. It would still be a much smaller decline than in 1918, when the so-called Spanish Flu caused life expectancy to fall by 11.8 years, he said. That is in part because, unlike Covid-19, that flu was particularly deadly among children, whose deaths disproportionately drive down life expectancy.

So at least Trump kept the decline in single digits. MAGA!

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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