Despite the vaccines, US life expectancy tumbled again last year


It wasn’t a huge surprise when it was announced in 2021 that life expectancy in the US had fallen in 2020 – as it did in a number of other developed countries. But everyone was expecting it to rebound in 2021, since…you know…there were effective vaccines available. In fact, the US probably did the best job of having vaccines ready in sufficient quantities of any developed country. What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, a lot.

Last week, WaPo did a great analysis of the 2021 numbers. You should read the article, but here are my highlights (lowlights?):

·        The US did worse in 2021 (and 2020) than 19 other wealthy countries. True, we did better than our 1.87-year decline in 2020, which was almost on a par with the decline in 1943, the worst year of World War II – that drop was 2.9 years. But while almost all of the other wealthy countries had an increase in life expectancy in 2021, we dropped .39 years.

·        The good news is that, while black and Hispanics had borne far more than their share of the drop in 2020, they turned that around dramatically in 2021. Hispanic life expectancy was almost flat, but Black expectancy increased by .42 years.

·        So how is it that life expectancy dropped last year, when the two worst-hit groups from 2020 did much better in 2021? You guessed it: White life expectancy declined by about a third of a year (four months).

·        What causes does the article point to for this turn of events? You guessed it: “vaccine hesitancy” and “…an overriding desire to put the pandemic behind us…”

The article includes a startling quote from Laudan Aron of the Urban Institute: “The life expectancy gap between the United States and its peer-income countries is now over five years, which is an incredible gap,” she said. “Death and life expectancy? That’s the ultimate marker of what it means to live in a country.”

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, April 10.

Month

Deaths reported during month/year

Avg. deaths per day during month/year

Deaths as percentage of previous month/year

Month of March 2020

4,058

131

 

Month of April

59,812

1,994

1,474%

Month of May

42,327

1,365

71%

Month of June

23,925

798

57%

Month of July

26,649

860

111%

Month of August

30,970

999

116%

Month of Sept.

22,809

760

75%

Month of Oct.

24,332

785

107%

Month of Nov.

38,293

1,276

157%

Month of Dec.

79,850

2,576

209%

Total 2020

354,215

1,154

 

Month of Jan. 2021

98,604

3,181

119%

Month of Feb.

68,918

2,461

70%

Month of March

37,945

1,224

55%

Month of April

24,323

811

64%

Month of May

19,843

661

82%

Month of June

10,544

351

53%

Month of July

8,833

287

84%

Month of August

31,160

1,005

351%

Month of Sept.

56,687

1,890

182%

Month of Oct.

49,992

1,613

88%

Month of Nov.

38,364

1,279

77%

Month of Dec.

41,452

1,337

108%

Total 2021

492,756

1,350

158%

Month of Jan. 2022

65,855

2,124

159%

Month of Feb. 2022

63,451

2,266

96%

Month of March 2022

31,427

1,014

50%

Total Pandemic so far

1,012,223

1,337

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,012,223

Average daily deaths last seven days: 471

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 655

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 82,073,451

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 198,919 (28,417/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 229,110 (32,730/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.2% (0.3% last week)

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

Deaths and Recoveries

I’m not bothering with my usual Numbers section today, since the 1-day and 7-day rates of increase in deaths and cases haven’t changed at all, and the ratio of deaths to closed cases remains at 17%. The projected deaths numbers are close to what they were yesterday. I haven’t discussed the ratio of deaths to closed cases for a while, although I’ve been reporting it. To refresh your memory, this is the ratio of total Covid-19 deaths so far to “closed cases”; closed cases is the sum of deaths so far and “recoveries” so far. The fact that the US rate is 17% means that, of all closed cases so far in the pandemic, 17% of them have resulted in death. This is down substantially from the initial value of 41%, in late March, when Worldometers started reporting recoveries. But it is still quite high – it seems to mean that, if you’re determined to have a “case” of Covid-19, the odds are close to 1 in 5 that you will die. I’ve been periodically comparing the US performance in this ar...
Read more