43 ms·

U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

192 points by davidbarker 4y ago

ekianjo 4y ago
> The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline. However, increases in the number of people dying from overdoses and accidents is also a significant factor. True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  Careful there; that could lead to a conversation about the cost/benefits of how lockdowns were implemented. Then we'd have to look at how younger generations were sacrificed for the older. Then we might have to talk about how that happens in many areas, from wealth distribution to climate change policy, from environmental policy to corporate accountability. Not to mention the wars. Can't be letting that type of discussion into the zeitgeist. Wealthy people might get upset.
  - not2b 4y ago
    The US didn't really do lockdowns; there were restrictions, particularly for international travel and to Hawaii, but people weren't confined to their homes as they were in other countries. Even in the more restrictive states you could always go out. But in many countries restrictions were much, much tougher.
    - davidro80 4y ago
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    The fact this is downvoted shows what an incredibly privileged life some people live. It’s easy to be all for lockdowns and shit when you own a home and make more than a quarter million dollars a year at your cushy work from home job. Meanwhile all the peasants expendable service workers out there had to keep on keeping on. It requires an incredible amount of privilege to buy into the Covid narrative that got sold to people.
  - tenpies 4y ago
    It will also be very interesting to see how mortality data trends during the next couple of years. I know there's a cohort of people that are pointing out at a certain national level field experiment as the cause of increased mortality, but there are also very valid reasons why we would see an increase in mortality now. More data will reveal to which degree each group is correct, and thankfully, we have a robust control group.
- hexsprite 4y ago
  Good point, one could measure (est.) years lost rather than lives lost as a way to quantify that.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    As it turns out quality adjusted life years has been the gold standard for measuring this before 2020. In a fit of hysteria we decided to toss that out the window (along with just about every single other bit of human knowledge). Imagine what would have been different if we used the industry standard way if measuring this sort of thing…
  - hackflip 4y ago
    "Let's lock down young healthy people's lives for 2 years so that the 86 year olds make it to 87"
- majormajor 4y ago
  > True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people. This, of course, actually depends on the numbers from both (both ages and volumes). The graph has a very clear inflection point from 2019 to 2020, overdoses were increasing for quite a while before that, so do you actually have numbers suggesting that the 2020 and 2021 impact of overdoses and accidents is greater than the completely-new-to-those-years factor?
- noodlenotes 4y ago
  One death from overdose is more impactful than one death from Covid, but if the increase in number of deaths from Covid (0 -> 400,000/year [1]) is much greater than the increase in deaths from overdoses (78,000 -> 100,000/year [2]), then Covid is the primary cause of the decline. Deaths from accidents also only increased 39,000 -> 43,000/year [3]. Let's say the average age of someone who dies from Covid is 75. Their life expectancy is another 11 years. [4] And someone who dies from an overdose or accident at 30 would have had another 48 years on average. There would have to be (400,000*11)/48 = 92,000 (rough math) additional overdose and accident deaths to come close to the impact Covid has had on life expectancy decline. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20211117.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/... [3] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra... [4] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
eric4smith 4y ago
Obesity. Covid literally attacks obese people. And obese people also are at huge risk. I'm overweight and I was literally frightened during covid. Now I lift weights every day and work on my diet very hard. But we are literally ignoring the elephant (literally) in the room.
- NovaVeles 4y ago
  The big wake up call for me was a few years earlier. I had just hit 130Kg (285+ pounds) and I had just had enough of it all! By the time I had COVID earlier this year I was down to around 90Kg (198 pounds) - I get the feeling that helped out immensely compared with how I used to be. Vaccines also did their part combined with the lessening impacts of the various variants. The other thing that got brought to my attention was an off handed comment about various health issues that are impacting populations. Things like declining fertility and increasing health issues almost always correlate more with obesity rather than the environmental factors. Yes, correlation is not causation but it does seem at fairly plausible. For example could things like micro plastics be doing these things? Yes. But one would expect these to be near global - yet the impacts are felt mostly in obese nations. It could potentially be a threat multiplier however.
  - strken 4y ago
    The rise in obesity is likely environmental. It's entirely possible that microplastics or PFAS (or whatever contaminant you want to point the finger at) causes obesity, which then causes health issues.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      It's fairly obvious when you travel to places with high obesity that the problem is environmental, but microplastics aren't even going to be in the top 20 reasons for that. The food culture in those places is just completely busted. You can sense it even in layovers at US airports.
    - acdha 4y ago
      It’s lifestyle: Americans lead the world in both obesity and car centric lifestyles, and we have a ton of reinforcing factors – suburbs designed around cars are unpleasant/unsafe to be active in, people eat unhealthy food because it’s cheap (cars and suburbs are both more expensive) and something they can eat in the car or pickup on the way home, kids are prevented from exercising because there are few safe places in their neighborhoods, etc. Americans who live in walkable settings are healthier on average but it’s not like they aren’t exposed to the same chemicals as their suburban counterparts.
nishs 4y ago
From the article, “The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline.” And it is going to decline further. Covid affects multiple organ systems; the acute phase of the infection, it is safe to say at this point, is not the primary cause of concern. Covid-19 infection increases the chances of a stroke 4x and of heart failure more than 10x, among other disorders, within 12 months of infection. [1] A chief scientist at the WHO recently said [2], “We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic.” [1]: https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1564612325356670978 https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1564612325356670978 [2]: https://twitter.com/doctorsoumya/status/1564649057599078401 https://twitter.com/doctorsoumya/status/1564649057599078401
- tjr225 4y ago
- musha68k 4y ago
  The effects are also compounding with each re-infection.
  - haggy102 4y ago
    Source?
    - stevenrj 4y ago
      https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1
      - EGreg 4y ago
        "However, whether reinfection adds to the risk incurred after the first infection is not clear."
        nishs 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
Less than 3 years longer than Bangladesh.
- incompatible 4y ago
  76.1 is 5 years less than males in Australia (females are another 4 years higher). Life expectancy increased in 2020/2021, as a side-effect of Covid measures, since there wasn't much actual Covid around. It will be interesting to see what happens now that Covid has been let loose. https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/life-expectancy-hits-new-high https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/life-expe...
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    Yeah, here is an Australia it was pretty surprising. We’d had some “horror flu seasons” over the last few years (over 1000 deaths in 2017 and about 900 in 2019), and then COVID hit and we managed to stay mostly on top of that, as well as the travel restrictions and lockdowns working so well that there was only 36 flu deaths in 2020 and none in 2021. For 2021 we actually had negative excess deaths. Since then we dropped basically all restrictions and have had 14,000 COVID deaths (all mostly this year, we had about 2,200 from the start of the pandemic to the end of 2021) which weirdly aren’t talked about in the media at all, whereas you’d hear about the daily death count every day during outbreaks in 2020 and 2021…
- superchroma 4y ago
  This is an important point. Americans need to take all the pairs of rose tinted glasses they have off and see that they're not stacking up that well to many other countries on numerous dimensions. It's not sufficient to gesture to prices of retail goods and say things are fine, because those prices have totally cratered in the last few years.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    I think this map makes very clear that there are certain regions where life expectancy is much worse than others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy#/media/File:Life_Expectancy_by_county_in_2018.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... There's a strong correlation between state life expectancy and whether that state has embraced the ACA expansion of Medicaid as well: https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/ https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-med...
diogenescynic 4y ago
I make a decent salary and so does my wife. We have two kids and we still don’t own a home. People I know who don’t work in tech are really struggling. There are multiple US cities without clean drinking water. It seems like the US is mostly in constant decline with a few elite city/states able to avoid the consequences. As a result, people eat junk food, go to the doctor less, have more stress, drive everywhere, no mandatory sick leave or vacation in most states. We’re killing ourselves. It’s plainly obvious when you travel abroad and see how well other people live in their countries for a fraction of the costs and stress. Diamonds are formed under pressure but bread dough rises when it rests… our society needs more time to make healthy food, exercise, and take a vacation…
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Exactly. It's not just the money cost of buying fresh, non-processed foods either; it's the time cost of going to the store for fresh ingredients, cooking, cleaning... A single person caring for children and working two jobs inevitably turns to the convenient fast food drive-thru as a result.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  direct consequence of a political system that can be bought and sold by money.
- hydrolox 4y ago
robryk 4y ago
Life expectancy is computed as if the model person lived all their life years this year. This means that when e.g. a new communicable disease appears which is more risky the first time one falls ill, its effect on life expectancy is outsized: we sum up the risk from getting that disease _for the first time_ over all years of life. A year later, we sum up delayed effects of getting it for the first time, etc. The article doesn't seem to address that at all.
chasd00 4y ago
remember during the lockdowns when incidence of cancer diagnoses, heart disease, and other life threatening ailments fell through the floor? I guess those chickens are coming home to roost. The total isolation resulting in depression/drug use, addiction, and overdose may have had a weee bit of an affect too.
- ajross 4y ago
  Do the numbers add up? That sounds like a prior-fitting hypothesis to me. Cancer, overdose, suicides, etc... are all well-tracked. If they were disproportionately high then surely we'd know.
  - 8b16380d 4y ago
    Overdose is disproportionately high though[1]. I mean, take a stroll thru most American cities and you can see what a toll drug use has done to many many people. Outside of the cities, the opioid crisis has claimed the lives of millions. I have had friends and family die from overdose and complications from over-prescription. It’s no secret; addressing the problem would cost drug manufacturers billions, which is why nothing is being done IMO [1]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/overdose-deaths-surged-first-half-2021-underscoring-urgent-need-action https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/overdose-deaths-s...
cykros 4y ago
I wonder how the median life expectancy has been changing in the past few years. Using the mean certainly allows for some shock and awe, and certainly serves to scare people (considering how much it is skewed by things like infant mortality, drug epidemics, wars, and most anything else that involves people dying at drastically different ages than the otherwise usual range), but it's always seemed to me that the median would be a more useful number. Indeed, the median has generally been a good few years above the mean, at least in America, though I can't say I've found tracking the data down nearly as easy as with the mean (okay, I tried for like, 7 seconds...but it wasn't in the top few results). Never mind the mode, which is even higher than either. It'd be nice to see data compiled showing the relation of mean, median, and mode, plotted over time, for life expectancy data. At the very least it'd likely help curb inflation, as people recognize that they're going to need a lot more retirement savings if they're suddenly saving for an extra decade than they were expecting using statistics improperly...
- drivebycomment 4y ago
  Median will almost always above mean when it comes to life expectancy. But I fully expect median to have dropped almost as much as mean in this case, since the pandemic affected the older adults more, hence it should have shifted/compressed the entire right side of the death frequency over age graph. Anyway, in terms of measuring overall society, mean is better than median for life expectancy, since it gives effectively more weight to earlier death. Median/mode would be more useful for individual.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Lots of Sudden Adult Deaths. And now people getting weaken immune response reinfections like Shingles. And even Athletes dropping out due to heart damage from the vaccine. Literally while Novak Djokovic wasn't allowed to play for not taking the vaccine, another athlete had to drop out of the same tournament with chest pains. Many people have low level myocarditis heart damage, that went undetected. Only when stressed it might suddenly show up and drop them in the years to come.
- peter422 4y ago
  Did anybody ever die unexpectedly before 2019?
  - nigrioid 4y ago
    Look into it. There are an awful lot of young athletes in peak physical condition that have collapsed on the field. A large number of Canadian doctors also died suddenly and unexpectedly.
    - peter422 4y ago
      An awful lot of young athletes collapsed on the field prior to 2019 as well. Look into it. I’ve sadly witnessed it happen before.
      - nigrioid 4y ago
        Climate Change is changing babies in the womb. They are more susceptible to heart disease.
    - thedorkknight 4y ago
      Do we have hard data on the rate of sudden deaths? Otherwise it seems like there is a high chance of confirmation bias
  - dukeofdoom 4y ago
    Apparently not at the same rate. In the UK, ages 1-59 year olds are dying at almost twice the rate if vaccinated than not. The forth chart from the top "ages 10-59" https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-about-real-world-impact-of-vaccines-on-all-cause-deaths https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a... This site is very pro vaccine, but even here they have to do a lot of hand waving to try and explain it away. And Suddenly everything is fuzzy, they can't quite put the two together. Which is almost funny considering these same people were touting the effectiveness of the vaccine on cherry picked statistical data with utmost certainty. APPENDIX 1. LIST OF ADVERSE EVENTS OF SPECIAL INTEREST from the pfizers own study. http://supremelaw.org/authors/pfizer/1290.adverse.events.htm http://supremelaw.org/authors/pfizer/1290.adverse.events.htm Here's another one, young person, story from today. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/ayr-centennials-hockey-player-dies-1.6568113 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/ayr-centen... [Edit] Corrected the link https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-about-real-world-impact-of-vaccines-on-all-cause-deaths https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a...
fortran77 4y ago
They're blaming COVID 19, but a very strong co-factor here is obesity.
- tenpies 4y ago
  From a resource perspective, it's fascinating how much money was incinerated on COVID. Just in legislative health spending, and in spending by the Exectuive you're talking $1.2 TT dollars spent (with much more still allocated)[1]. Imagine if just 1% of that went towards cardiovascular health. We could have seriously moved the needle on the cause of diseases that consistently kills orders of magnitude more people. And sure, COVID had three months when it was the leading cause of death[2]. But just heart disease, kills nearly as many people every month. --- [1] https://www.covidmoneytracker.org https://www.covidmoneytracker.org [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254560/leading-causes-of-death-in-the-us-average-number-daily/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254560/leading-causes-o...
obblekk 4y ago
This even shows up in countries that had lax lockdowns vs. strict lockdowns: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2020&locations=SE-AU-ES-US&start=2008 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2020... This data next year will be very telling to see the true efficacy of strict lockdowns (I suspect very effective at preventing death since vaccines arrived so quickly). Australia data should be interesting next year (very strict to very lax after vaccines).
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  It didn't show up in China... their life expectancy has consistently risen. It's above the US life expectency now.
  - cies 4y ago
    I also do not trust their data as much.
jp0d 4y ago
This is quite bad compared to other developed countries with similar HDI scores.
panny 4y ago
It stands to reason that * If the vaccine is safe and effective, life expectancy would improve some over 2020 * If the vaccine is safe and ineffective, life expectancy would stay about the same as 2020 * If the vaccine is unsafe and ineffective, life expectency would drop below 2020 We are now witnessing the third outcome.
- drekipus 4y ago
  Very simple-minded view despite that America is hugely overweight and have issues besides covid. Also your logic is wrong. If vaccine is safe and effective, the life expectancy would remain the same (IE: no additional deaths due to covid) You're trying to make a point and not making a very good job of it.
  - dumbplestilskin 4y ago
    I’m more in agreement with him as opposed to your viewpoint. FWIW I have a degree in formal logic, and his logic is not “wrong”. I’d very much like to hear how it is. :)
    - physicles 4y ago
      It seems you're focusing on the fact that a conditional statement can be logically true independent of whether its hypothesis itself has any merit. (e.g. the proposition "If the sun goes dark tomorrow, then within a few years most people on earth will almost certainly be dead" is sound, even if the sun probably doesn't go dark tomorrow) But like GP said, the conditional statements themselves presuppose that vaccines are the only variable affecting life expectancy. But that's not true, there are other factors.
      - dumbplestilskin 4y ago
        It’s the inversion of your propositional case, however. His claim is not that the vaccine has caused extra deaths (the sun goes dark) but rather that if the vaccine is unsafe in -some- or all causes then mortality would increase on average. (if more people get sunburned from a hotter sun, we will see more skin cancer) It follows, and my interpretation of the data is that the vaccines are causing some issues or not giving enough protection for some individuals while working for others, and obesity and other factors also increased. Terribly boring, wouldn’t you agree? But often the boring data is the correct data, or in other words: averages tend to represent a trend better than outliers.
wsc981 4y ago
Regarding excess deaths, Dr. John Campbell has an interesting video on the subject [0], mainly regarding Scotland but he talks about other countries as well. Of course, as excess deaths increase, average life expectancy will reduce. Seems many countries have seen a big increase in excess deaths, but thus far the cause is unknown. These 'cause unknown' excess deaths are not attributed to COVID, as COVID deaths are a separate category. --- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wLu98NygrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wLu98NygrA
- chaosbolt 4y ago
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
    Do you mean vaccines?
    - pacerwpg 4y ago
      Damn, you haven't been cancelled yet, how did you get around this world of censorship?
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
        Damn, my cover blown!
  - wsc981 4y ago
    The problem is that free speech is kind of gone from the internet, now that internet is for a large part social media and the biggest social media companies are closely aligned with governments. Free speech has been deemed dangerous now. Hence all the 'Russian fake news' lies we've been bombarded with in recent years. And it's quite visible in another recent video by Dr. John Campbell. Now please note, from the start of the pandemic, Dr. John Campbell was a proponent of the mRNA vaccines. But in a recent video [0] on changes by the CDC and it's UK equivalent regarding COVID vaccine recommendations for pregnant & breastfeeding woman, it's quite clear (to me) that he indirectly criticises the censorship on YouTube. --- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3GMgee-vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3GMgee-vc
imwillofficial 4y ago
- dumbplestilskin 4y ago
lettergram 4y ago
[flagged]
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Does it give you even the smallest bit of pause, that you, with absolutely no background in any of the relevant fields are so confident about your bizarre thesis while all of the experts disagree with you?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lettergram 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - wuschel 4y ago
      I don’t have time to read the paper yet - what you are saying that the tricky bit is the concentration increase of the spike protein that is a consequence of the rapid translation of mRNA after administration of the vaccine. How hard is the data on this? I am triple vaxed, and I remember getting heart palpitations for a while. Then again, there were other problematic factor in my life at the time that I can not separate out. Would you have more data, explanations, or could a Corona expert jump in?
      - lettergram 4y ago
        I cant find it at the moment (thanks censorship!), but I believe the worst short-term side effects are 12hrs - 7 days. At least that’s when the fatalities occur, then risk drops dramatically. That said, in the paper I linked, that’s also when Pfizer stopped monitoring or at least didn’t share their data. We only have observational evidence from the cdc (ie no controlled clinical trial). Random article says 12-48 hrs https://www.verywellhealth.com/when-to-expect-covid-19-vaccination-side-effects-5176621 https://www.verywellhealth.com/when-to-expect-covid-19-vacci... As I’ve mentioned elsewhere (and is relatively well known) when you see myocarditis in youngish people, that likely means long-term heart damage. We don’t have any of that data because Pfizer and moderna haven’t released that data. Further, they basically scrapped their trial by giving the control group the vaccine. So any new trial has to start over.
stakkur 4y ago
Consider the dataset. Adjust expectations accordingly.
g42gregory 4y ago
credit_guy 4y ago
This is an artifact of the statistical model used to estimate the life expectancy. The model is called Lee-Carter [1], and it's basically a linear regression. The last 2 years were outliers in terms experienced mortality. Most likely mortality will not stay elevated in the years to come. But the model does not know this. It simply uses these years to estimate how the mortality will evolve. Now, one can say that some people will experience long covid, so their mortality rate will stay elevated for years to come. Fair, but that does not apply to people of age 0 (newborns), which is what this life expectancy number that's being reported is. For those people, the life expectancy will not be lower than before Covid, if anything it will be slightly higher (corresponding to 2 years of progress). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model
PopAlongKid 4y ago
Meanwhile, in a complete denial of reality, the IRS (U.S. tax agency) has just revised its life expectancy tables this year in light of what they claim is an increase in life expectancy. These are the divisors used to determine the amount of annual distributions for tax purposes that retirees must take from their pre-tax accounts (IRAs, 401ks, etc). And Congress also moved the required start date up to age 72 from 70.5, again in the direction opposite of that dictated by reality. (The point of the required distributions is to get all the pre-tax money out of the accounts and taxed by expected age of death). "In general, since life expectancy has increased, the divisor used to calculate 2022 RMDs for a given age has also increased."[0] [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliejason/2022/03/02/theyre-here-new-rmd-tables-just-published-in-2021-irs-pub-590-b/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliejason/2022/03/02/theyre-he...

192 points by davidbarker 4y ago

> The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline. However, increases in the number of people dying from overdoses and accidents is also a significant factor. True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people.

mandmandam 4y ago
Careful there; that could lead to a conversation about the cost/benefits of how lockdowns were implemented. Then we'd have to look at how younger generations were sacrificed for the older. Then we might have to talk about how that happens in many areas, from wealth distribution to climate change policy, from environmental policy to corporate accountability. Not to mention the wars. Can't be letting that type of discussion into the zeitgeist. Wealthy people might get upset.
- not2b 4y ago
  The US didn't really do lockdowns; there were restrictions, particularly for international travel and to Hawaii, but people weren't confined to their homes as they were in other countries. Even in the more restrictive states you could always go out. But in many countries restrictions were much, much tougher.
  - davidro80 4y ago
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  The fact this is downvoted shows what an incredibly privileged life some people live. It’s easy to be all for lockdowns and shit when you own a home and make more than a quarter million dollars a year at your cushy work from home job. Meanwhile all the peasants expendable service workers out there had to keep on keeping on. It requires an incredible amount of privilege to buy into the Covid narrative that got sold to people.
- tenpies 4y ago
  It will also be very interesting to see how mortality data trends during the next couple of years. I know there's a cohort of people that are pointing out at a certain national level field experiment as the cause of increased mortality, but there are also very valid reasons why we would see an increase in mortality now. More data will reveal to which degree each group is correct, and thankfully, we have a robust control group.
hexsprite 4y ago
Good point, one could measure (est.) years lost rather than lives lost as a way to quantify that.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  As it turns out quality adjusted life years has been the gold standard for measuring this before 2020. In a fit of hysteria we decided to toss that out the window (along with just about every single other bit of human knowledge). Imagine what would have been different if we used the industry standard way if measuring this sort of thing…
- hackflip 4y ago
  "Let's lock down young healthy people's lives for 2 years so that the 86 year olds make it to 87"
majormajor 4y ago
> True statement but it should be the other way around. Deaths by overdoses are much more impactful in terms of life expectancy decline, since they mostly kill younger people. This, of course, actually depends on the numbers from both (both ages and volumes). The graph has a very clear inflection point from 2019 to 2020, overdoses were increasing for quite a while before that, so do you actually have numbers suggesting that the 2020 and 2021 impact of overdoses and accidents is greater than the completely-new-to-those-years factor?
noodlenotes 4y ago
One death from overdose is more impactful than one death from Covid, but if the increase in number of deaths from Covid (0 -> 400,000/year [1]) is much greater than the increase in deaths from overdoses (78,000 -> 100,000/year [2]), then Covid is the primary cause of the decline. Deaths from accidents also only increased 39,000 -> 43,000/year [3]. Let's say the average age of someone who dies from Covid is 75. Their life expectancy is another 11 years. [4] And someone who dies from an overdose or accident at 30 would have had another 48 years on average. There would have to be (400,000*11)/48 = 92,000 (rough math) additional overdose and accident deaths to come close to the impact Covid has had on life expectancy decline. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20211117.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/... [3] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra... [4] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

eric4smith 4y ago

Obesity. Covid literally attacks obese people. And obese people also are at huge risk. I'm overweight and I was literally frightened during covid. Now I lift weights every day and work on my diet very hard. But we are literally ignoring the elephant (literally) in the room.

NovaVeles 4y ago
The big wake up call for me was a few years earlier. I had just hit 130Kg (285+ pounds) and I had just had enough of it all! By the time I had COVID earlier this year I was down to around 90Kg (198 pounds) - I get the feeling that helped out immensely compared with how I used to be. Vaccines also did their part combined with the lessening impacts of the various variants. The other thing that got brought to my attention was an off handed comment about various health issues that are impacting populations. Things like declining fertility and increasing health issues almost always correlate more with obesity rather than the environmental factors. Yes, correlation is not causation but it does seem at fairly plausible. For example could things like micro plastics be doing these things? Yes. But one would expect these to be near global - yet the impacts are felt mostly in obese nations. It could potentially be a threat multiplier however.
- strken 4y ago
  The rise in obesity is likely environmental. It's entirely possible that microplastics or PFAS (or whatever contaminant you want to point the finger at) causes obesity, which then causes health issues.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    It's fairly obvious when you travel to places with high obesity that the problem is environmental, but microplastics aren't even going to be in the top 20 reasons for that. The food culture in those places is just completely busted. You can sense it even in layovers at US airports.
  - acdha 4y ago
    It’s lifestyle: Americans lead the world in both obesity and car centric lifestyles, and we have a ton of reinforcing factors – suburbs designed around cars are unpleasant/unsafe to be active in, people eat unhealthy food because it’s cheap (cars and suburbs are both more expensive) and something they can eat in the car or pickup on the way home, kids are prevented from exercising because there are few safe places in their neighborhoods, etc. Americans who live in walkable settings are healthier on average but it’s not like they aren’t exposed to the same chemicals as their suburban counterparts.

nishs 4y ago

From the article, “The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline.” And it is going to decline further. Covid affects multiple organ systems; the acute phase of the infection, it is safe to say at this point, is not the primary cause of concern. Covid-19 infection increases the chances of a stroke 4x and of heart failure more than 10x, among other disorders, within 12 months of infection. [1] A chief scientist at the WHO recently said [2], “We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic.” [1]: https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1564612325356670978 https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1564612325356670978 [2]: https://twitter.com/doctorsoumya/status/1564649057599078401 https://twitter.com/doctorsoumya/status/1564649057599078401

tjr225 4y ago
musha68k 4y ago
The effects are also compounding with each re-infection.
- haggy102 4y ago
  Source?
  - stevenrj 4y ago
    https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1
    - EGreg 4y ago
      "However, whether reinfection adds to the risk incurred after the first infection is not clear."
      - nishs 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

Less than 3 years longer than Bangladesh.

incompatible 4y ago
76.1 is 5 years less than males in Australia (females are another 4 years higher). Life expectancy increased in 2020/2021, as a side-effect of Covid measures, since there wasn't much actual Covid around. It will be interesting to see what happens now that Covid has been let loose. https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/life-expectancy-hits-new-high https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/life-expe...
- stephen_g 4y ago
  Yeah, here is an Australia it was pretty surprising. We’d had some “horror flu seasons” over the last few years (over 1000 deaths in 2017 and about 900 in 2019), and then COVID hit and we managed to stay mostly on top of that, as well as the travel restrictions and lockdowns working so well that there was only 36 flu deaths in 2020 and none in 2021. For 2021 we actually had negative excess deaths. Since then we dropped basically all restrictions and have had 14,000 COVID deaths (all mostly this year, we had about 2,200 from the start of the pandemic to the end of 2021) which weirdly aren’t talked about in the media at all, whereas you’d hear about the daily death count every day during outbreaks in 2020 and 2021…
superchroma 4y ago
This is an important point. Americans need to take all the pairs of rose tinted glasses they have off and see that they're not stacking up that well to many other countries on numerous dimensions. It's not sufficient to gesture to prices of retail goods and say things are fine, because those prices have totally cratered in the last few years.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  I think this map makes very clear that there are certain regions where life expectancy is much worse than others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy#/media/File:Life_Expectancy_by_county_in_2018.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... There's a strong correlation between state life expectancy and whether that state has embraced the ACA expansion of Medicaid as well: https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/ https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-med...

diogenescynic 4y ago

I make a decent salary and so does my wife. We have two kids and we still don’t own a home. People I know who don’t work in tech are really struggling. There are multiple US cities without clean drinking water. It seems like the US is mostly in constant decline with a few elite city/states able to avoid the consequences. As a result, people eat junk food, go to the doctor less, have more stress, drive everywhere, no mandatory sick leave or vacation in most states. We’re killing ourselves. It’s plainly obvious when you travel abroad and see how well other people live in their countries for a fraction of the costs and stress. Diamonds are formed under pressure but bread dough rises when it rests… our society needs more time to make healthy food, exercise, and take a vacation…

wildrhythms 4y ago
Exactly. It's not just the money cost of buying fresh, non-processed foods either; it's the time cost of going to the store for fresh ingredients, cooking, cleaning... A single person caring for children and working two jobs inevitably turns to the convenient fast food drive-thru as a result.
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
direct consequence of a political system that can be bought and sold by money.
hydrolox 4y ago

robryk 4y ago

Life expectancy is computed as if the model person lived all their life years this year. This means that when e.g. a new communicable disease appears which is more risky the first time one falls ill, its effect on life expectancy is outsized: we sum up the risk from getting that disease _for the first time_ over all years of life. A year later, we sum up delayed effects of getting it for the first time, etc. The article doesn't seem to address that at all.

chasd00 4y ago

remember during the lockdowns when incidence of cancer diagnoses, heart disease, and other life threatening ailments fell through the floor? I guess those chickens are coming home to roost. The total isolation resulting in depression/drug use, addiction, and overdose may have had a weee bit of an affect too.

ajross 4y ago
Do the numbers add up? That sounds like a prior-fitting hypothesis to me. Cancer, overdose, suicides, etc... are all well-tracked. If they were disproportionately high then surely we'd know.
- 8b16380d 4y ago
  Overdose is disproportionately high though[1]. I mean, take a stroll thru most American cities and you can see what a toll drug use has done to many many people. Outside of the cities, the opioid crisis has claimed the lives of millions. I have had friends and family die from overdose and complications from over-prescription. It’s no secret; addressing the problem would cost drug manufacturers billions, which is why nothing is being done IMO [1]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/overdose-deaths-surged-first-half-2021-underscoring-urgent-need-action https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/overdose-deaths-s...

cykros 4y ago

I wonder how the median life expectancy has been changing in the past few years. Using the mean certainly allows for some shock and awe, and certainly serves to scare people (considering how much it is skewed by things like infant mortality, drug epidemics, wars, and most anything else that involves people dying at drastically different ages than the otherwise usual range), but it's always seemed to me that the median would be a more useful number. Indeed, the median has generally been a good few years above the mean, at least in America, though I can't say I've found tracking the data down nearly as easy as with the mean (okay, I tried for like, 7 seconds...but it wasn't in the top few results). Never mind the mode, which is even higher than either. It'd be nice to see data compiled showing the relation of mean, median, and mode, plotted over time, for life expectancy data. At the very least it'd likely help curb inflation, as people recognize that they're going to need a lot more retirement savings if they're suddenly saving for an extra decade than they were expecting using statistics improperly...

drivebycomment 4y ago
Median will almost always above mean when it comes to life expectancy. But I fully expect median to have dropped almost as much as mean in this case, since the pandemic affected the older adults more, hence it should have shifted/compressed the entire right side of the death frequency over age graph. Anyway, in terms of measuring overall society, mean is better than median for life expectancy, since it gives effectively more weight to earlier death. Median/mode would be more useful for individual.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

Lots of Sudden Adult Deaths. And now people getting weaken immune response reinfections like Shingles. And even Athletes dropping out due to heart damage from the vaccine. Literally while Novak Djokovic wasn't allowed to play for not taking the vaccine, another athlete had to drop out of the same tournament with chest pains. Many people have low level myocarditis heart damage, that went undetected. Only when stressed it might suddenly show up and drop them in the years to come.

peter422 4y ago
Did anybody ever die unexpectedly before 2019?
- nigrioid 4y ago
  Look into it. There are an awful lot of young athletes in peak physical condition that have collapsed on the field. A large number of Canadian doctors also died suddenly and unexpectedly.
  - peter422 4y ago
    An awful lot of young athletes collapsed on the field prior to 2019 as well. Look into it. I’ve sadly witnessed it happen before.
    - nigrioid 4y ago
      Climate Change is changing babies in the womb. They are more susceptible to heart disease.
  - thedorkknight 4y ago
    Do we have hard data on the rate of sudden deaths? Otherwise it seems like there is a high chance of confirmation bias
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Apparently not at the same rate. In the UK, ages 1-59 year olds are dying at almost twice the rate if vaccinated than not. The forth chart from the top "ages 10-59" https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-about-real-world-impact-of-vaccines-on-all-cause-deaths https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a... This site is very pro vaccine, but even here they have to do a lot of hand waving to try and explain it away. And Suddenly everything is fuzzy, they can't quite put the two together. Which is almost funny considering these same people were touting the effectiveness of the vaccine on cherry picked statistical data with utmost certainty. APPENDIX 1. LIST OF ADVERSE EVENTS OF SPECIAL INTEREST from the pfizers own study. http://supremelaw.org/authors/pfizer/1290.adverse.events.htm http://supremelaw.org/authors/pfizer/1290.adverse.events.htm Here's another one, young person, story from today. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/ayr-centennials-hockey-player-dies-1.6568113 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/ayr-centen... [Edit] Corrected the link https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-about-real-world-impact-of-vaccines-on-all-cause-deaths https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/what-do-uk-data-say-a...

fortran77 4y ago

They're blaming COVID 19, but a very strong co-factor here is obesity.

tenpies 4y ago
From a resource perspective, it's fascinating how much money was incinerated on COVID. Just in legislative health spending, and in spending by the Exectuive you're talking $1.2 TT dollars spent (with much more still allocated)[1]. Imagine if just 1% of that went towards cardiovascular health. We could have seriously moved the needle on the cause of diseases that consistently kills orders of magnitude more people. And sure, COVID had three months when it was the leading cause of death[2]. But just heart disease, kills nearly as many people every month. --- [1] https://www.covidmoneytracker.org https://www.covidmoneytracker.org [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254560/leading-causes-of-death-in-the-us-average-number-daily/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254560/leading-causes-o...

obblekk 4y ago

This even shows up in countries that had lax lockdowns vs. strict lockdowns: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2020&locations=SE-AU-ES-US&start=2008 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2020... This data next year will be very telling to see the true efficacy of strict lockdowns (I suspect very effective at preventing death since vaccines arrived so quickly). Australia data should be interesting next year (very strict to very lax after vaccines).

qbasic_forever 4y ago
It didn't show up in China... their life expectancy has consistently risen. It's above the US life expectency now.
- cies 4y ago
  I also do not trust their data as much.

jp0d 4y ago

This is quite bad compared to other developed countries with similar HDI scores.

panny 4y ago

It stands to reason that * If the vaccine is safe and effective, life expectancy would improve some over 2020 * If the vaccine is safe and ineffective, life expectancy would stay about the same as 2020 * If the vaccine is unsafe and ineffective, life expectency would drop below 2020 We are now witnessing the third outcome.

drekipus 4y ago
Very simple-minded view despite that America is hugely overweight and have issues besides covid. Also your logic is wrong. If vaccine is safe and effective, the life expectancy would remain the same (IE: no additional deaths due to covid) You're trying to make a point and not making a very good job of it.
- dumbplestilskin 4y ago
  I’m more in agreement with him as opposed to your viewpoint. FWIW I have a degree in formal logic, and his logic is not “wrong”. I’d very much like to hear how it is. :)
  - physicles 4y ago
    It seems you're focusing on the fact that a conditional statement can be logically true independent of whether its hypothesis itself has any merit. (e.g. the proposition "If the sun goes dark tomorrow, then within a few years most people on earth will almost certainly be dead" is sound, even if the sun probably doesn't go dark tomorrow) But like GP said, the conditional statements themselves presuppose that vaccines are the only variable affecting life expectancy. But that's not true, there are other factors.
    - dumbplestilskin 4y ago
      It’s the inversion of your propositional case, however. His claim is not that the vaccine has caused extra deaths (the sun goes dark) but rather that if the vaccine is unsafe in -some- or all causes then mortality would increase on average. (if more people get sunburned from a hotter sun, we will see more skin cancer) It follows, and my interpretation of the data is that the vaccines are causing some issues or not giving enough protection for some individuals while working for others, and obesity and other factors also increased. Terribly boring, wouldn’t you agree? But often the boring data is the correct data, or in other words: averages tend to represent a trend better than outliers.

wsc981 4y ago

Regarding excess deaths, Dr. John Campbell has an interesting video on the subject [0], mainly regarding Scotland but he talks about other countries as well. Of course, as excess deaths increase, average life expectancy will reduce. Seems many countries have seen a big increase in excess deaths, but thus far the cause is unknown. These 'cause unknown' excess deaths are not attributed to COVID, as COVID deaths are a separate category. --- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wLu98NygrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wLu98NygrA

chaosbolt 4y ago
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Do you mean vaccines?
  - pacerwpg 4y ago
    Damn, you haven't been cancelled yet, how did you get around this world of censorship?
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      Damn, my cover blown!
- wsc981 4y ago
  The problem is that free speech is kind of gone from the internet, now that internet is for a large part social media and the biggest social media companies are closely aligned with governments. Free speech has been deemed dangerous now. Hence all the 'Russian fake news' lies we've been bombarded with in recent years. And it's quite visible in another recent video by Dr. John Campbell. Now please note, from the start of the pandemic, Dr. John Campbell was a proponent of the mRNA vaccines. But in a recent video [0] on changes by the CDC and it's UK equivalent regarding COVID vaccine recommendations for pregnant & breastfeeding woman, it's quite clear (to me) that he indirectly criticises the censorship on YouTube. --- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3GMgee-vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3GMgee-vc

imwillofficial 4y ago

dumbplestilskin 4y ago

lettergram 4y ago

[flagged]

mikeyouse 4y ago
Does it give you even the smallest bit of pause, that you, with absolutely no background in any of the relevant fields are so confident about your bizarre thesis while all of the experts disagree with you?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lettergram 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - wuschel 4y ago
    I don’t have time to read the paper yet - what you are saying that the tricky bit is the concentration increase of the spike protein that is a consequence of the rapid translation of mRNA after administration of the vaccine. How hard is the data on this? I am triple vaxed, and I remember getting heart palpitations for a while. Then again, there were other problematic factor in my life at the time that I can not separate out. Would you have more data, explanations, or could a Corona expert jump in?
    - lettergram 4y ago
      I cant find it at the moment (thanks censorship!), but I believe the worst short-term side effects are 12hrs - 7 days. At least that’s when the fatalities occur, then risk drops dramatically. That said, in the paper I linked, that’s also when Pfizer stopped monitoring or at least didn’t share their data. We only have observational evidence from the cdc (ie no controlled clinical trial). Random article says 12-48 hrs https://www.verywellhealth.com/when-to-expect-covid-19-vaccination-side-effects-5176621 https://www.verywellhealth.com/when-to-expect-covid-19-vacci... As I’ve mentioned elsewhere (and is relatively well known) when you see myocarditis in youngish people, that likely means long-term heart damage. We don’t have any of that data because Pfizer and moderna haven’t released that data. Further, they basically scrapped their trial by giving the control group the vaccine. So any new trial has to start over.

stakkur 4y ago

Consider the dataset. Adjust expectations accordingly.

g42gregory 4y ago

credit_guy 4y ago

This is an artifact of the statistical model used to estimate the life expectancy. The model is called Lee-Carter [1], and it's basically a linear regression. The last 2 years were outliers in terms experienced mortality. Most likely mortality will not stay elevated in the years to come. But the model does not know this. It simply uses these years to estimate how the mortality will evolve. Now, one can say that some people will experience long covid, so their mortality rate will stay elevated for years to come. Fair, but that does not apply to people of age 0 (newborns), which is what this life expectancy number that's being reported is. For those people, the life expectancy will not be lower than before Covid, if anything it will be slightly higher (corresponding to 2 years of progress). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee%E2%80%93Carter_model

PopAlongKid 4y ago

Meanwhile, in a complete denial of reality, the IRS (U.S. tax agency) has just revised its life expectancy tables this year in light of what they claim is an increase in life expectancy. These are the divisors used to determine the amount of annual distributions for tax purposes that retirees must take from their pre-tax accounts (IRAs, 401ks, etc). And Congress also moved the required start date up to age 72 from 70.5, again in the direction opposite of that dictated by reality. (The point of the required distributions is to get all the pre-tax money out of the accounts and taxed by expected age of death). "In general, since life expectancy has increased, the divisor used to calculate 2022 RMDs for a given age has also increased."[0] [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliejason/2022/03/02/theyre-here-new-rmd-tables-just-published-in-2021-irs-pub-590-b/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliejason/2022/03/02/theyre-he...