Life expectancy for the U.S. fell in 2020 from 78.8 in 2019 to “just” 77 in 2020, and major media are having a field day talking about the precipitous “cliff” of death that the pandemic has created.
It’s a drop of 2.3%. But is it really as bad as it sounds? Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute explains it in terms of relativity, i.e., what the drop means relative to what the life expectancy has been in the past 20 years.
And his conclusion is that, first, “life expectancy in the U.S. had already all but screeched to a halt in the decade leading up to 2020,” and second, that when taken in context and “even considering recent data on life expectancy and mortality, it remains extremely unclear why 2020’s changes in these metrics would justify the extreme panic and human rights violations that resulted from stay-at-home edicts and coerced medication.”
.SOURCE: Mises Institute December 22, 2021