Pandemic Sends Arizona Life Expectancy Below National Average


 As we all know, a lot of people perished during the pandemic. Also as I have blogged before, Arizona is worst among all the states in that regard. 

Now, stats are out from the CDC showing that Arizona had an average life expectancy of 76.3 years in 2020. That is below the national average of 77 (a figure that is itself down by two years because of the pandemic), and puts us at a rank of 33 among the states. 

The worst is Mississippi at 71.9 years. That's probably at least partly because people there have to spend so much time typing the extra letters of their state's name over the course their lifetime.

Arizona Public Health Association Will Humble noted that this is the biggest drop in life expectancy since World War II. Then it was because of battlefield deaths.

Today it's because of COVID-19 deaths, but as Humble points out, it's not only those deaths: 

When you have a hospital system that’s overwhelmed, and ours was in crisis standards of care in July 2020, a lot of people died because they couldn’t get care that they really needed because the hospitals were completely packed with COVID patients.



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