Native American life expectancy down 4 years in 3 years
American Indians born in 2022 expect to live 16.6 years less than Asian Americans and 12.1 years less than Hispanics.
The life expectancy of each American race/ethnicity dropped from 2019 to 2022 due to increases in deaths due to covid, overdoses, homicides, and car crashes according to the federal National Vital Statistics System’s report in November 2023.
But Native American life expectancy fell a horrifying 3.9 years in 36 months, from 71.8 years to 67.9 years, with practically nobody in the outside world paying the slightest bit of attention.
Asian American life expectancy dropped the smallest amount from 2019 to 2022, 1.1 years from 85.6 to 84.5.
Whites dropped 1.3 years from 78.8 to 77.5, a remarkable 7.0 years shorter than Asian life expectancy.
Hispanics, who saw a major surge in traffic fatalities and homicides from 2019 to 2022 during the George Floyd racial reckoning depolicing frenzy, saw a decline of 1.9 years. (While covid strikes oldsters and thus has less impact on life expectancy per death, homicides, recreational drug overdoses, and car crashes tend to kill younger people, which shortens life expectancy more.)
Even so, Latino life expectancy in 2022 was still 80.0 years, a striking 2.5 years longer than white life expectancy. Among demographic and gerontological researchers, the remarkably long life spans of Mexican-Americans is known as the Hispanic Paradox. There are many theories for why poor Latinos outlive whites, but no consensus.
Black life expectancy declined 2.0 years from 74.8 in 2019 to 72.8 as homicides and car crashes surged during Black Lives Matter’s ascendancy.
American Indian lifespans were only 71.8 in 2019, but by 2022 were down to a Third Worldish 67.9, a drop of 3.9 years in 36 months.
What about 2023? The feds released their 2021 life expectancy numbers in August 2022, but their 2022 numbers not until November 2023, so we’ll just have to wait and see when they get around to publishing their 2023 numbers.
A May 2024 preprint by Harry Wexler guesstimates that overall life expectancy increased by one year in 2023, so that 76% of the loss of life expectancy in 2020-21 was regained in 2022-23. But Wexler did not break out life expectancy by race, so those figures are just for the whole population.
Did COVID hit younger Indians harder than other groups, or was it deaths of exuberant despair?
Perhaps the complete removal of Indian iconography from American culture scalped their collective psyche.
Here's a weird little fact we don't seem very concerned about:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline?country=~USA
excess deaths continued well after the pandemic.
You might say the recent numbers are within normal limits and I might agree, but here's the weird part. After 2 or 3 years of our most vulnerable citizens dying early, shouldn't we see below normal deaths for a few years as the supply of the "about to die" builds back up?
Is their methodology sophisticated enough that these numbers are already corrected for this?