People of Color Are Most Affected, As US Life Expectancy Drops, Amid Pandemic.<br />According to new research, U.S. life expectancy decreased by 1.87 years between 2018 and 2020.<br />Website Science Daily reports that such a <br />drop has not been seen since World War II.<br />The study was conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Colorado Boulder and the Urban Institute.<br />The data was released by 'The BMJ,' <br />a journal published by the British Medical Association, on June 23.<br />Among people of color, <br />the numbers were even worse.<br />On average, life expectancy among white Americans decreased by 1.36 years in 2020.<br />Among Black Americans, <br />it decreased by 3.25 years.<br />Hispanic Americans' life expectancy decreased by 3.88 years.<br />The report also showed that the loss of life expectancy in the U.S. was 8.5 times that of the average for 16 peer countries.<br />For minority populations, those declines were 15 to 18 times larger than other countries.<br />When the pandemic came, <br />my naïve assumption was <br />that it would not have a big <br />impact on the preexisting <br />gap between the U.S. <br />and peer countries, Steven Woolf, M.D., study lead author and director emeritus of VCU's Center on Society and Health, via Science Daily.<br />It was a global pandemic, <br />and I assumed that every country <br />would take a hit. What I did not <br />anticipate was how badly the U.S. <br />would fare in the pandemic and <br />the enormous death toll that <br />the U.S. would experience, Steven Woolf, M.D., study lead author and director emeritus of VCU's Center on Society and Health, via Science Daily.<br />According to Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center, the U.S. death toll has surpassed 600,000
