Decline in US Life Expectancy Second Highest Among Wealthy Countries in 2020, Study Says

The survey's lead author Nazrul Islam bemoaned "a huge amount of people at a young age" having died in the US last year, something that he said had added to the nation's decline in life expectancy.

In 2020, life expectancy in the US saw the second steepest drop among wealthy countries amid the coronavirus pandemic, a British Medical Journal (BMJ) study has revealed.

In the research published on Wednesday, BMJ analysed historical trends between 2005 and 2019, comparing them to the observed life expectancy last year.

After examining data from 37 upper-middle and high-income countries, the study found that US life expectancy plummeted by about 2.3 years for men and over 1.6 years for women in 2020.

The survey's lead author, Dr Nazrul Islam, told NBC News that it was the deaths of young people that fuelled the drop in life expectancy in America.

In the US, "we have lost a huge amount of people at a young age. That's really, really sobering", Islam, who serves as a researcher at the University of Oxford, emphasised.

He said that US life expectancy in 2020 was "comparable to life expectancy, in men, back to 2002", adding that "everything we [the country] have achieved over the last 19 years was sort of lost".

The study suggested that the US failed to do enough to protect young people during the COVID-19 pandemic last year, arguing that the nation's life expectancy dropped at a faster pace than any time since at least the Second World War.

Bryan Tysinger, a research assistant in health policy at the University of Southern California, who was not part of the BMJ research, for his part, said that "it continues to be striking how poorly the US has handled the COVID pandemic".

The professor underscored that "the US should not be leading or nearly leading excess deaths in a pandemic like this".

He was echoed by Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral researcher in gerontology at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the BMJ study. She insisted that the research "reveals the US did a poor job protecting younger individuals or they were more susceptible compared to other countries".

As of Wednesday, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US had jumped to 46.2 million, with 750,426 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University's latest estimates.