As hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed by the COVID-19 epidemic, the average life expectancy of Americans shortened by 1.5 years to 77.3 years in 2020, the biggest annual decline since 1943.

Estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the disproportionate number of deaths in communities of color caused by the pandemic has also widened the existing gap in life expectancy between whites and blacks in the United States.

This figure represents an extremely grim record of an ongoing disaster. The first year of the pandemic dealt a bigger blow to American life expectancy than any other year of the Vietnam War, the AIDS crisis or the "death of despair". "death of despair" refers to a rise in the number of drug, suicide or alcohol abuse deaths in the United States in the mid-2010s, leading to a decline in average life expectancy, a situation that experts call the "death of despair" (deaths of despair), when the social safety net is eroded, class inequality widens, and the younger generation feels vulnerable to the future and leads to self-destruction.

"it's shocking and frustrating," said Noreen Goldman, a professor of demography and public affairs at Princeton University. The United States actually lags behind all high-income countries in terms of life expectancy and is still lagging further. "

Goldman said it was the second-largest drop in life expectancy in the United States since the 1918 Spanish pandemic, which killed about 50 million people worldwide.