Steven H. Woolf is a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University. Laudan Aron is a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute in D.C.
Last fall, when federal statistics showed life expectancy had fallen for Americans in 2021 for a second year in a row, it was clear that the devastating covid-19 pandemic was the immediate cause. The coronavirus took the lives of more than 1 million Americans. Life expectancy fell by more than two years — and by twice as much among Hispanic, Black and Native Americans — setting the country back by two decades and producing the most abrupt decline in life expectancy since World War II.