COVID: US life expectancy drops, Black and Latinos hardest hit

Latino and Black communities see life expectancy fall by 2 and 3 years respectively, in first 6 months of 2020.

Life expectancy in the United States dropped a staggering one year during the first half of 2020 as COVID-19 caused its first wave of deaths that disproportionately affected people of colour, according to a new report (PDF) by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Thursday. “This is a huge decline,” Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC, told the Associated Press. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.” Life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average. In the first half of last year, that was 77.8 years for Americans overall, down one year from 78.8 in 2019. For males, it was 75.1 years and for females, 80.5 years.