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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/11/20/covid-19-pandemic-life-expectancy-race/">https://theintercept.com/2020/11/20/covid-19-pandemic-life-expectancy-race/</a></font>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Race Gap in U.S. Life Expectancy Widens as Covid-19 Toll Grows</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Sharon Lerner - November 20, 2020<br></div></div><hr><div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p><u>The gap between</u>
Black and white life expectancy in the U.S. is expected to widen by as
much as 5.17 years by the end of 2020 due to the disproportionate toll
of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.12.20148387v3">study</a>
by Theresa Andrasfay and Noreen Goldman. The researchers — a
postdoctoral fellow in gerontology from the University of Southern
California and a professor of demography from Princeton University —
found that overall, life expectancy in the U.S. will shrink by more than
one year because of the pandemic. For Black people, the average
lifespan will be shortened by just over two years, while Latinos will
see their life expectancy from birth reduced by more than three years.
Meanwhile, the pandemic will shave just over eight months off the white
lifespan.</p><div><p>Since the U.S. began compiling
data on life expectancy in 1930, white people have lived longer on
average than Black people. Those early calculations showed the
difference between the two groups to be a startling 13.3 years. With a
few exceptions, over the past 90 years, the race gap has slowly and
steadily become smaller to the point where, in 2017, white people lived
3.6 years longer on average than Black people. But the coronavirus has
suddenly and forcefully disrupted that progress.</p>
<p>The overall drop in life expectancy in the U.S. — from 78.6 years in
2017 to a projected 77.5 in 2020 — appears to be the greatest reduction
since the pandemic of 1918, which is estimated to have taken more than
seven years off the average lifespan in the U.S., according to the
study, which is awaiting peer review.</p>
<p>But the biggest impact of the pandemic, which has already killed more
than 251,000 in the U.S., is on people of color. The death rate from
Covid-19 among Black people — 114.3 for every 100,000 people — is almost
double the 61.7 per 100,000 death rate for white people. Indigenous
Americans and Latinos also have significantly higher death rates from
Covid-19 than whites, according to the <a href="https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race">APM Research Lab</a>,
which last updated its data on November 12. Black people accounted for
18.7 percent of deaths from Covid-19 but make up just 12.5 percent of
the U.S. population, according to the most recent data from the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e1.htm#T1_down">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>.</p>
<p>While Latinos will see the greatest reduction in their lifespans,
according to the study, they generally live longer than white people in
the U.S. In 2017, their life expectancy was 81.8 years, more than three
years greater than white life expectancy. In 2020, the pandemic is
expected to all but wipe away this longevity advantage, known as the <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-02-12/hispanic-paradox-in-health-extends-beyond-us-borders">Latino paradox</a>.</p>
<h3>Inequality Throughout Life</h3>
<p>The historic race gap between white and Black lifespan in the U.S. is
due to inequality in both living circumstances and health care. Black
people in the U.S are more likely to be poor and unemployed and are
disproportionately exposed to <a href="https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/firearms-death-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D">gun violence</a>, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/08/08/coronavirus-pollution-environmental-justice-racism/">environmental pollution</a>, and unsafe working conditions. Black people in the U.S. also receive <a href="https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/racial-disparities-in-health-care/">inferior health care</a> and are more likely to be <a href="https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/changes-in-health-coverage-by-race-and-ethnicity-since-the-aca-2010-2018/">uninsured</a>.</p>
<p>The inequities take their toll from the earliest point in life, with Black infants far more likely to be <a href="https://www.marchofdimes.org/Peristats/ViewSubtopic.aspx?reg=99&top=4&stop=45&lev=1&slev=1&obj=1">underweight at birth</a> and <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/infantmortality.htm">die</a>, with
health disparities continuing through adulthood. Black people have a
greater share of many chronic diseases, including diabetes, <a href="https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/consumer-healthcare/what-is-cardiovascular-disease/african-americans-and-heart-disease-stroke">stroke, and heart disease</a>, and the nation’s highest death rate from most cancers.</p>
<p>The disproportionate burden of these long-term conditions set older
people of color up for more severe and deadly cases of Covid-19. But the
undue racial impacts of the coronavirus can be also seen at the
earliest stages of life.</p>
</div><p><a href="https://theintercept.com/collections/the-coronavirus-crisis/"><span><span><img alt="The Coronavirus Crisis" src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/03/GettyImages-1206948638-coronavirus-1584129093-promo.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&fit=crop&w=440&h=220" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="440" height="220"></span></span><span><span>Read Our Complete Coverage</span><span>The Coronavirus Crisis</span></span></a></p><div><p>“There’s
a really big disparity in terms of mortality, with Black and Hispanic
kids much more likely to die than white kids,” said Elizabeth Pathak, an
epidemiologist who created the <a href="https://www.covkidproject.org/">COVKID Project</a> to track Covid-19 in children. According to <a href="http://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/blog/racial-disparity-mortality-covid-children">data</a> the
group analyzed from the CDC and the National Center for Health
Statistics, American Indian/Alaska Native children and teens are 7.6
times more likely to die from Covid-19 than non-Hispanic white children
and teens; Black children and teens are 5.3 times more likely to die
from the disease; and Hispanic children and teens are 4.7 times more
likely to die from it.</p>
<p>Like the preexisting health disparities, the disproportionate impact
of the pandemic is due to racism — and the consequences of living in a
society that doles out privileges and protections unequally — rather
than race itself. The greater likelihood of being unable to work from
home and living in a crowded household contribute to Black people’s
higher chances of contracting Covid-19 while decreased access to medical
care and a higher prevalence of underlying conditions worsen the impact
of those infections.</p>
<p>Even racist attitudes can affect the impact of the coronavirus, according to a <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242044">study</a> published Wednesday in PLOS ONE. The authors, who used <a href="https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/">data</a>
about people’s self-professed biases about race as a proxy for racism,
found that levels of racial bias in U.S. counties tracked with both
Covid-19 cases and deaths. “Our study showed that explicit and implicit
forms of racism predicted cases even beyond the county demographics,”
said George B. Cunningham, a professor at Texas A&M University and
one of the study’s authors. “Racial attitudes reflect deeper biases that
are embedded into systems within society. It shows that racism
negatively impacts health.”</p>
<p>While there was little question before that racism impacted lifespan,
the already glaring gap between Black and white life expectancies has
been brought into dramatic relief by the pandemic. The years lopped off
Black and brown lives in 2020 are about 10 times as large as the annual
drops in life expectancy due to “<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism">deaths of despair</a>”
that were observed in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Those contractions of life
expectancy — about a month each — were largely due to increased deaths
by suicides, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning among low-income white
people without a college degree and rightly sparked a search for <a href="https://escholarship.org/content/qt14f015df/qt14f015df_noSplash_937f93199ae74bf2d11cd944e2cb8e21.pdf">policy solutions</a>.</p>
<p>The dramatic new data on shortened lifespans are yet another
indication of the abject failure of the United States to respond to the
biggest public health crisis of our times.</p></div></div></div></div>
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