How big of an effect has the coronavirus pandemic had on the health of Americans? Well because of the virus life expectancy in the United States will drop by more than a full year because of the virus. At least, those are the findings of a new study published in the journal  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to that study, this will be the largest decline in life expectancy in the United States since World War II. It will bring the country's life expectancy to its lowest level since 2003. Oh, if you're wondering life expectancy in the United States will now be 77.48 years.

The reason this is news is that life expectancy in this country rarely declines by such a large margin anyway. The years 2015, 2016, and 2017, each showed a decline by 0.1 years. That decrease in life expectancy has been attributed to things like drug use, drug overdoses, and suicides. The current forecast decline is ten times the rate for those "deaths of despair".

The study, when broken down by race and socio-economic criteria found that black life expectancy was expected to fall by 2.1 years and the life expectancy for Latino people in this county will drop by an estimated 3.05 years. If you're wondering about white people, it's estimated that life expectancy will only decrease by .68 years.

There are many more nuances to the study and how the data is gleened and dispersed. It's an interesting read and you can find the report and some interesting discussion about how it was done via the website livescience.com. 

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