In a sign that the coronavirus pandemic is cutting short the lives of Americans, a new government report finds that average life expectancy in the United States took a drastic plunge during the first half of 2020, particularly among Black and Hispanic people. Overall U.S. life expectancy dropped to 77.8 years, down one full year from the 78.8 years estimated in 2019.

Declines were even greater for certain demographics. For example, average life expectancy decreased 2.7 years for Black people and 1.9 for Hispanic people between 2019 and the first half of 2020, according to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which is part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Life expectancy for white people decreased by an average of 0.8 years. To put those numbers in context, it made headlines when the average U.S. life expectancy dropped by 0.2 years between 2014 and 2015, after years of steady increases.

Life expectancy varied much more widely when gender and ethnicity were taken into account:

• Black male life expectancy dropped by 3 years (71.3 to 68.3)
• Hispanic males lost 2.4 years of life expectancy (79 to 76.6)
• Black females had a 2.3-year decline (78.1 to 75.8)
• Hispanic females had a 1.1-year decline (84.4 to 83.3)

By comparison, white males had a decline in life expectancy of 0.8 years (76.3 to 75.5), while white women had a 0.7-year decline (81.3 to 80.6). "For the overall U.S., it was a year lost. So then when you triple that for Black men, double that for Hispanic men, that's a problem," Benjamin said. "The whole nation was devastated, but it also tells us the enormous inequities we have in health just took us backward," Benjamin noted that during the pandemic the country lost more people than it did during the entire span of World War II, including deaths both in combat and on the home front.