actually does well at keeping people alive once they’re really old,” she said, but it struggles to get its citizens to that point. really go off the rails,” Wrigley-Field told me.
As many studies and reports have shown, since the turn of the 21st century, “midlife ages are where health and survival in the U.S. The crisis of early death was evident well before COVID. Read: How did this many deaths become normal? “This is a damning finding,” Oni Blackstock, the founder and executive director of Health Justice, told me. had mortality rates on par with its peers.
From 2019 to 2021, the number of working-age Americans who died increased by 233,000-and nine in 10 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if the U.S. Even though working-age Americans were less likely to die of COVID than older Americans, they fared considerably worse than similarly aged people in other countries. But this well-known trend hides a less obvious one: During the pandemic, half of the U.S.’s excess deaths-the missing Americans-were under 65 years old. In every country, the coronavirus wrought greater damage upon the bodies of the elderly than the young. The country is experiencing what Bor and his colleagues call “a crisis of early death”-a long-simmering tragedy that COVID took to a furious boil. Someone might reasonably ask: What’s the big deal if I die at 76 versus 78? But in fact, life expectancy is falling behind other wealthy nations in large part because a lot of Americans are dying very young-in their 40s and 50s, rather than their 70s and 80s. But Bor says that people often misinterpret life-expectancy declines, as if they simply represent a few years shaved off the end of a life. And although many countries took a longevity hit because of COVID, America was once again exceptional: Among its peers, it experienced the largest life-expectancy decline in 2020 and, unlike its peers, continued declining in 2021. Several studies, for example, have shown that America’s life expectancy has tailed behind other comparable countries since the 1970s. “It builds on, and considerably expands, what we’ve already known.” “The paper is extremely important, and the researchers who produced this know what they’re doing,” Steven Woolf, a population-health expert at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me. “I don’t think people in the United States actually have any awareness of just how poorly we do as a country at letting people live to old age,” Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, told me.Īlthough Bor’s study has yet to be formally reviewed, Wrigley-Field and five other independent researchers vouched for its quality to me. COVID simply did more of what life in America has excelled at for decades: killing Americans in unusually large numbers, and at unusually young ages. had the worst outbreak in the industrialized world-not just because of what the Trump and Biden administrations did, but also because of the country’s rotten rootstock. In fact, as one expert predicted in March 2020, the U.S. was just one unremarkable victim of a crisis that spared no nation and that COVID disrupted a status quo that was strong and worth restoring wholesale. These counterfactuals puncture two common myths about America’s pandemic experience: that the U.S. “It raises the hairs on the back of my neck.” “Think of two people you might know under 65 who died last year: One of them might still be alive,” he said. That includes half of all deaths among working-age adults. “just average compared to other wealthy countries, not even the best performer, fully a third of all deaths last year would have been prevented,” Bor told me. After COVID arrived, that statistic ballooned even further-to 992,000 in 2020, and to 1.1 million in 2021. By 2019, the number of missing Americans had grown to 626,000. They showed that from the 1980s onward, the U.S.
For every year from 1933 to 2021, they compared America’s mortality rates with the average of Canada, Japan, and 16 Western European nations (adjusting for age and population). He calls such people “missing Americans.” And he calculates that in 2021 alone, there were 1.1 million of them.īor and his colleagues arrived at that number by using data from an international mortality database and the CDC. Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, imagines the people who are still alive in that other world but who died in ours. He envisions a world in which America has health on par with that of other wealthy nations, and is not an embarrassing outlier that, despite spending more on health care than any other country, has shorter life spans, higher rates of chronic disease and maternal mortality, and fewer doctors per capita than its peers. Jacob Bor has been thinking about a parallel universe.
0 kommentar(er)
