Photo Courtesy PBS News Hour
In the first six months of 2020, life expectancy in the United States dropped by a full year, according to new federal data. Released Thursday, these latest figures offer a staggering glimpse at the cost of the first surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Elizabeth Arias, a demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics who served as the report’s lead author.
Even the loss or gain of two months of life expectancy in a single year is enough to get the attention of health statisticians who study how Americans live and die.
“This one-year decline in the total population is quite large,” Arias said.
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