by David Wallace-Wells (NY Times 8/9/2023)

Death is excessive in America, and the more you look the more distressing the picture seems.

You’ve probably heard about the mortality crisis in terms of its effect on average life spans — several years ago, after decades of steady improvements, life expectancy in the United States took an unprecedented turn for the worse, placing it not among its wealthy peers, but below Kosovo, Albania, Sri Lanka and Algeria (and just ahead of Panama, Turkey and Lebanon). And while the trend is clear, the change may seem small, because the impact is averaged over the country as a whole. American life expectancy dropped just 0.1 year between 2014 and 2019, before Covid.

But the loss is jaw-dropping by another measure — the sheer number of needless deaths. Before the pandemic, roughly a half million more people in America died each year than would have died, on average, in wealthy peer countries. In each of the first two years of the pandemic, the number surpassed one million.

Those are conclusions of a paper, “Missing Americans: Early Death in the United States — 1933-2021,” by a team of mortality researchers published in May that tabulated the number of “missing” Americans by comparing U.S. death rates with the average of 21 closely comparable countries, mostly pretty-rich nations across Europe. Led by Jacob Bor of Boston University, the group found that almost a quarter of U.S. deaths in the years before the pandemic would not have happened had our mortality rates in those years matched those of our economic peers. During the pandemic, about one-third of all American deaths would have been avoided.

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Citations

Missing Americans: Early death in the United States—1933–2021

Causes of America’s Lagging Life Expectancy: An International Comparative Perspective