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Falling life expectancy ‘shows how US is responding to coronavirus’: experts

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Justice News Flash Report

Falling life expectancy ‘shows how US is responding to coronavirus’: experts

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To corroborate the headline statement, Lambert pointed out that Covid has shown that the government can get away with 1 million deaths.

The U.S. has failed on a variety of social metrics, not just life expectancy, but height (a measure of the quality of a young person’s diet), educational attainment, teen births, crime rates. Hollywood is our important bulwark against the rest of the world realizing how far we’ve fallen.

by Jessica Corbett.Originally Posted in common dream

Just over a month old The third year In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, research on Thursday showed that life expectancy in the U.S. fell again in 2021 — and it’s well-documented reduce In 2020, it contrasts sharply with the recovery trends in other high-income countries.

The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, shows that life expectancy in the US fell from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 years in 2020 and 76.60 years in 2021, a net loss of 2.26 years.

The study comes as progressives in Congress continue to fight for Medicare-for-all legislation to replace America’s for-profit health care system – in which 112 million adults struggle to afford health care, according to Gallup and West Health.

The study was also conducted a few days after the analysis of the movement of the poor exposedHow the public health crisis is twice as deadly in poor counties as in rich ones, and ‘exacerbating America’s long-deteriorating pre-existing social and economic disparities’

Case Tracker at Johns Hopkins University report Covid-19 has claimed 984,571 lives in the United States as of Thursday afternoon, accounting for nearly 16% of the more than 6 million deaths worldwide.

Dr. Steven Woolf, co-author of the new study and director emeritus of the Center for Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said“We already know that the U.S. experienced a historic loss of life expectancy in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. What is unclear is what will happen in 2021,” it said in a statement.

“In early 2021, I knew an excellent vaccine was being distributed, and I was hopeful that the U.S. would recoup some of the historic losses,” Woolf said. “But as I saw what happened over time, I started to worry even more. .”

“Even so, as a scientist, until I see these data, it’s still an open question how life expectancy in the U.S. will be affected that year,” he added. “It is shocking that life expectancy in the U.S. has not rebounded, but has fallen further.”

In addition to examining the U.S., the researchers also looked at life expectancy over the past two years in 19 “peer countries” and found a smaller decline in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 — an average of 0.57 years — followed by an average increase took 0.28 years from 2020 to 2021.

“While life expectancy in other high-income countries has increased in 2021, compensating for about half of the loss, life expectancy in the United States continues to decline,” Woolf said. “This speaks volumes about how the United States is dealing with the lived consequences of this pandemic.”

Addressing policymakers opposed to curbing the spread of the virus, the expert added: “In a country where the U.S. Constitution and the Tenth Amendment give states public health authority, I believe America’s disaster speaks volumes about the policies and behavior of U.S. governors — at least among them Some. A highly effective vaccine emerges in 2021, making Covid-19 deaths almost entirely preventable.”

Woolf emphasized that while the Delta and Omicron variants had a major impact on deaths in the United States, the mutations also affected other countries where life expectancy rebounded last year.

“Deaths from these variants occurred almost exclusively in unvaccinated populations,” he said. “What’s happening in the U.S. is not so much a variation as it is the level of resistance to vaccination and the public’s rejection of practices like mask-wearing and mandates to reduce the spread of the virus.”

Noting high rates of heart disease and obesity and inequities in healthcare in the U.S., lead author Ryan Masters, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, said: “These same factors make the U.S. more Countries are more vulnerable to the consequences of death. Covid-19.”

The study states, “The Hispanic and non-Hispanic black populations in the U.S. will experience the largest loss of life expectancy during the two-year period 2019-2021, reflecting the legacy of systemic racism and the U.S. response to the pandemic. insufficient.”

“Sadly, it’s not surprising to see a disproportionate impact on people of color,” Woolf said. Our research has shown this before. But 2021 takes an interesting plot twist: life expectancy The only decline was in whites. Life expectancy in the black population even increased.”

“Despite the increase,” he noted, “Black life expectancy remains much lower than other groups, but the disproportionate impact on whites provides clues to what will happen in 2021.”

Co-author Laudan Aron, Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Institute, TellWashington post“It’s hard to imagine that willingness to get vaccinated isn’t part of the puzzle.”

“The gap in life expectancy between the U.S. and countries of equal income is now more than five years, which is an incredible disparity,” she said. “Death and life expectancy? It’s the ultimate marker of what it means to live in a country.”

Some members of Congress have argued that the pandemic has demonstrated the need for a national plan that treats health care as a fundamental human right and benefits communities that are disproportionately excluded and abused under the existing profit-driven system.

Rep. Corey Bush (D-Mo.) last month at the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee’s first Medicare-for-all hearing since the pandemic began. Announce“This policy will save lives, I want to make that clear.”

“I hope this hearing is another step in our commitment to ensuring that everyone in this country, especially our Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, has access to the health care they need to thrive,” she said.

The day after the House event, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — a longtime Medicare-for-all advocate —AnnounceHis panel will hold a similar hearing in early May.

On social media Friday, Sanders’ chief of staff, Warren Gunnels, pointed to the new paper and saidHe “couldn’t stop thinking about how many lives could have been saved if Congress passed Bernie’s bill requiring Medicare to cover all health care costs for the uninsured and underinsured during the pandemic, and those costs were paid in full by one person Yes. – A 60% wealth tax on 700 billionaires.”

The new study follows a study in March postin the magazine population and development reviewthe study found that “global life expectancy appears to have fallen by 0.92 years between 2019 and 2020 and another 0.72 years between 2020 and 2021.”

That paper—authored by Patrick Heuveline of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA—concludes that:

Changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 in the United States, Europe and some other countries have received extensive attention. The results presented here confirm several key findings of previous analyses, such as the large impact of the pandemic on mortality (1) the United States relative to other high-income countries in Western Europe, (2) Russia relative to the rest of Europe, and most importantly, the , (3) in some Central and South American countries.

Using reports of deaths from Covid-19 at the end of 2021 and modeling their relationship to excess deaths, preliminary estimates of changes in life expectancy in 2021 were also made. These results show that, on the one hand, the disparity between Western Europe is widening, and on the other hand, life expectancy in the United States continues to decline, and life expectancy declines in Russia are even greater, and the decline is expected to be greater in 2021 than in 2020.

Writing Thursday about Heuveline’s findings world socialism websiteEvan Black and Benjamin Matthaus make“Unlike previous pandemics, all aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic are predictable and preventable, as documented in dozens of academic papers, books and even movies published since the early 2000s.”

“At every step, the financial oligarchs and their political representatives ensured that profit was put above human life and well-being,” they added. “In short, the decline in life expectancy is a concrete health measure of a society’s murder policies, which Currency value can be assessed by a synchronized rise in stock market indices.”



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