COVID: US life expectancy drops, Black and Latinos hardest hit

Life expectancy in the United States dropped a staggering one year during the first half of 2020 as COVID-19 caused its first wave of deaths that disproportionately affected people of colour, according to a new report (PDF) by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Thursday.

“This is a huge decline,” Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC, told the Associated Press. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”