Now there’s empirical data to show just how far the country has run off the rails: Life expectancies have been falling. Advertisement“COVID-19 has erased two decades of life expectancy growth in the U.S., whereas the average life expectancy for comparable countries has decreased only marginally, to 2018 levels,” the Health System Tracker found. “America is seeing the greatest gap in life expectancy across regions in the last 40 years,” Ney says. The lowest average life expectancies are seen in the states of the Southeast, according to 2020 figures from the CDC: South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi all had average life expectancies from birth of less than 75 years. The factors contributing to America’s decline in life expectancies could point to a decline in its international stature.

Source: Los Angeles Times April 10, 2023 20:57 UTC