Living Life
This was somewhat unnerving last week…news that life expectancy in this country dropped last year.
Some of that is due to COVID, of course; a 12-month period during a global pandemic with increased death rates will skew the data, obviously.
Life expectancy in this country dropped by a year and a half in 2020 alone…that’s the largest one-year decline since World War II…a man-made pandemic of death, if you will.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims COVID is responsible for three-quarters of the overall life expectancy decline. More than 3.3 million Americans died in 2020, far more than any year in U.S. history—of course, we had the largest population of any time in history, as well. COVID accounted for 11 percent of that 3.3 million death number.
But there’s obviously more to it than just COVID. For example, note that life expectancy dropped by double the overall amount, by three years, among both blacks and Hispanics in this country.
Might that have something to do with lifestyle? Particularly, living in large metro areas where high weekend death rates are a way of life these days? Perhaps also tied to gangs?
Easier to dismiss it all by blaming COVID. Because fixing the root cause of those problems facing our major cities is harder, and exposes long-time failures of government in those areas.
