Life expectancy in California was higher before the pandemic than after, but mainly for causes other than COVVI-19, reveals a new study.
Not only did life expectancy in the greatest American state have dropped significantly in 2020 and 2021 – at the peak of the pandemic – but it remained lower in 2024 than in 2019, reveals an analysis published Wednesday in the medical newspaper Jama.
However, the main causes of this drop are not linked to COVID-19. Overdoses and cardiovascular diseases, in particular, represent a greater proportion of the causes of death than the virus.
The observation surprises one of the authors of the article. Researchers generally expect to see an increase in life expectancy after a pandemic, even what it “sometimes exceeds the average for a few years,” said Hannes Schwandt, a health economist at Northwestern University and co-author of the study, New York Times.
With The New York Times
