Life Expectancy Ticks Up in 2022

Mike Stobbe at AP:

U.S. life expectancy rose last year — by more than a year — but still isn’t close to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2022 rise was mainly due to the waning pandemic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said Wednesday. But even with the large increase, U.S. life expectancy is only back to 77 years, 6 months — about what it was two decades ago.

Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, assuming the death rates at that time hold constant. The snapshot statistic is considered one of the most important measures of the health of the U.S. population. The 2022 calculations released Wednesday are provisional, and could change a little as the math is finalized.

American Men and Life Expectancy

 A release from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

We’ve known for more than a century that women outlive men. But new research led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and UC San Francisco shows that, at least in the United States, the gap has been widening for more than a decade. The trend is being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose epidemic, among other factors.

In a research paper, to be published online on November 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors found the difference between how long American men and women live increased to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest it’s been since 1996. This is an increase from 4.8 years in 2010, when the gap was at its smallest in recent history.

The pandemic, which took a disproportionate toll on men, was the biggest contributor to the widening gap from 2019-2021, followed by unintentional injuries and poisonings (mostly drug overdoses), accidents, and suicide.

“There’s been a lot of research into the decline in life expectancy in recent years, but no one has systematically analyzed why the gap between men and women has been widening since 2010,” said first author Brandon Yan, a UCSF internal medicine resident physician and research collaborator at Harvard Chan School.

Life expectancy in the U.S. dropped in 2021 to 76.1 years, falling from 78.8 years in 2019 and 77 years in 2020.

The shortening lifespan of Americans has been attributed in part to so-called “deaths of despair.” The term refers to the increase in deaths from such causes as suicide, drug use disorders, and alcoholic liver disease, which are often connected with economic hardship, depression, and stress.

“While rates of death from drug overdose and homicide have climbed for both men and women, it is clear that men constitute an increasingly disproportionate share of these deaths,” Yan said.

Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, Yan and fellow researchers from around the country identified the causes of death that were lowering life expectancy the most. Then they estimated the effects on men and women to see how much different causes were contributing to the gap.

Prior to the COVID pandemic, the largest contributors were unintentional injuries, diabetes, suicide, homicide, and heart disease.

But during the pandemic, men were more likely to die of the virus. That was likely due to a number of reasons, including differences in health behaviors, as well as social factors, such as the risk of exposure at work, reluctance to seek medical care, incarceration, and housing instability. Chronic metabolic disorders, mental illness, and gun violence also contributed.

Yan said the results raise questions about whether more specialized care for men, such as in mental health, should be developed to address the growing disparity in life expectancy.

“We have brought insights to a worrisome trend,” Yan said. “Future research ought to help focus public health interventions towards helping reverse this decline in life expectancy.”

Yan and co-authors, including senior author Howard Koh, professor of the practice of public health leadership at Harvard Chan School, also noted that further analysis is needed to see if these trends change after 2021.

“We need to track these trends closely as the pandemic recedes,” Koh said. “And we must make significant investments in prevention and care to ensure that this widening disparity, among many others, do not become entrenched.”

Alan Geller, senior lecturer on social and behavioral sciences at Harvard Chan School, was also a co-author.

“Widening Gender Gap in Life Expectancy in the US, 2010-2021,” Brandon W. Yan, Elizabeth Erias, Alan C. Geller, Donald R. Miller, Kenneth D. Kochanek, Howard K. Koh, JAMA Internal Medicine, online November 13, 2023, doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.6041

Education and Overdose

Many posts have discussed iinequality and higher education.

October 6, 2023  

David Powell, "Educational Attainment and US Drug Overdose Deaths"

JAMA Health Forum. 2023;4(10):e233274. doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2023.3274

Key Points

Question  Was educational attainment associated with overdose death rate growth in the US from 2000 to 2021?

Findings  In this cross-sectional study of 912 057 overdose deaths in the US from 2000 to 2021, overdose deaths increased sharply among individuals without any college education. The overdose death rate increased substantially between 2018 and 2021 for those without a high school diploma, primarily due to increases in deaths with synthetic opioid involvement.

Meaning  In this study, educational attainment, an important component of socioeconomic status, was found to be associated with overdose deaths, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Behold a Pale Horse

 

Seat belts. Cigarette taxes. Public health investment.

Some lawmakers chose to back these policies. Others don’t.

Those choices along red and blue lines are shaving years off American lives.

w/ @ddiamond @dtkeating https://t.co/QJB3wadyGe

— Lauren Weber (@LaurenWeberHP) October 3, 2023

The mortality crisis has developed over decades, with early deaths an extreme manifestation of an underlying deterioration of health and a failure of the health system to respond.

Covid highlighted this for all the world to see. https://t.co/lHDJyxzH2Z

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 3, 2023

Life Expectancy and Education

 Anne Case and Angus Deaton:at Brookings:

The widening gap in death rates between Americans with and without a four-year college degree shows the U.S. economy is failing working class people, suggests a paper discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 28.

The U.S. economy, as measured by conventional metrics such as growth in gross domestic product (GDP), has recently outperformed other advanced economies. But mortality data paint a different picture, according to “Accounting for the Widening Mortality Gap between American Adults with and without a BA.”

“GDP may be doing great, but people are dying in increasing numbers, especially less-educated people,” Anne Case, one of the authors, said in an interview with The Brookings Institution. “A lot of the increasing prosperity is going to the well-educated elites. It is not going to typical working people.”

She and co-author Angus Deaton, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, both of Princeton University, analyzed U.S. death certificate information, including the age of death, cause of death, and educational attainment. They found that life expectancy for the college educated in 2021 was eight-and-a-half years longer than for the two-thirds of American adults without a bachelor’s degree. That’s more than triple the 1992 gap of about two-and-a-half years.

... 

 Deaths of despair were the leading driver of the widening mortality gap over the past 30 years, but the gap also widened for most other major causes of death, the paper notes. Cancer mortality, for instance, has declined overall but it has declined more for people with college degrees.

The mortality gap widened explosively during the pandemic, according to the paper. Both COVID-19 deaths and deaths of despair were more common among people without college degrees, who were more likely to work in public-facing jobs, use public transportation, and live in crowded quarters.

“People with BAs have Zoom. People without BAs don’t have Zoom; they have to go to work,” Deaton said.

 

US Has Fallen Behind in Life Expectancy

American Journal of Public Health, "Falling Behind: The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy Between the United States and Other Countries, 1933–2021,"   by Steven H. Woolf MD, MPH.

Objectives. To document the evolution of the US life expectancy disadvantage and regional variation across the US states.

Methods. I obtained life expectancy estimates in 2022 from the United Nations, the Human Mortality Database, and the US Mortality Database, and calculated changes in growth rates, US global position (rank), and state-level trends.

Results. Increases in US life expectancy slowed from 1950 to 1954 (0.21 years/annum) and 1955 to 1973 (0.10 years/annum), accelerated from 1974 to 1982 (0.34 years/annum), and progressively deteriorated from 1983 to 2009 (0.15 years/annum), 2010 to 2019 (0.06 years/annum), and 2020 to 2021 (–0.97 years/annum). Other countries experienced faster growth in each phase except 1974 to 1982. During 1933 to 2021, 56 countries on 6 continents surpassed US life expectancy. Growth in US life expectancy was slowest in Midwest and South Central states.

Conclusions. The US life expectancy disadvantage began in the 1950s and has steadily worsened over the past 4 decades. Dozens of globally diverse countries have outperformed the United States. Causal factors appear to have been concentrated in the Midwest and South.

Public Health Implications. Policies that differentiate the United States from other countries and circumstances associated with the Midwest and South may have contributed. (Am J Public Health. 2023;113(9):970–980. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307310)

I consider this chart to be the clearest indictment of our country’s path over the last several decades: In 1980, the U.S. had a typical life expectancy for an affluent country. Today, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy of any affluent country: pic.twitter.com/GhUIn9fzdb

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) August 22, 2023

Opioid Abuse and Deaths of Despir

National Institute on Drug Abuse:

In 2021, an estimated 2.5 million people aged 18 years or older in the U.S. had opioid use disorder in the past year, yet only 1 in 5 of them (22%) received medications to treat it, according to a new study Some groups were substantially less likely to receive medication for opioid use disorder, including Black adults, women, those who were unemployed, and those in nonmetropolitan areas.

 Chun-Tung Kuo, and Ichiro Kawachi at JAMA Network: "County-Level Income Inequality, Social Mobility, and Deaths of Despair in the US, 2000-2019."

Question  Is the interaction between income inequality and social mobility associated with an increased risk of deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease) among the working-age population in the US?

Findings  In this cross-sectional study, higher income inequality and lower social mobility were associated with a higher burden of deaths of despair for Black, Hispanic, and White populations. In addition, the joint exposure of unequal income distribution and lack of social mobility was associated with additional risks of deaths of despair on both the additive and multiplicative scales.

Meaning  The findings of this study suggest that policy responses to the epidemic of deaths of despair must address the underlying social and economic conditions associated with these deaths.

Memorial Day 2023

 From CRS:

From 2006 through 2021, a total of 19,378 active-duty servicemembers have died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. Of those who died, 24% were killed while serving in in what the Department of Defense (DOD) categorizes as Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)—primarily within the territories of Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining 76% died during operations categorized as Non-Overseas Contingency Operations (Non-OCO). The categories with the highest number of active-duty servicemember deaths were accidents, self-inflicted wounds, and illnesses or injuries. Table 1 summarizes all active-duty military deaths by category from 2006 through 2021. The data starts in 2006 because DOD implemented a new casualty reporting system then, so the analysis excludes casualties that occurred in earlier years, including during combat operations from 2001 to 2005. DOD Instruction (DODI) 1300.18 details department policies and procedures for reporting military casualties

Firearm Incident Data

From KFF:

Experiences with gun-related incidents are common among U.S. adults. One in five (21%) say they have personally been threatened with a gun, a similar share (19%) say a family member was killed by a gun (including death by suicide), and nearly as many (17%) have personally witnessed someone being shot. Smaller shares have personally shot a gun in self-defense (4%) or been injured in a shooting (4%). In total, about half (54%) of all U.S. adults say they or a family member have ever had one of these experiences.

From Pew:

The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest annual mortality statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, there were 1,732 gun deaths among U.S. children and teens under the age of 18. By 2021, that figure had increased to 2,590.

The gun death rate among children and teens – a measure that adjusts for changes in the nation’s population – rose from 2.4 fatalities per 100,000 minor residents in 2019 to 3.5 per 100,000 two years later, a 46% increase.

Both the number and rate of children and teens killed by gunfire in 2021 were higher than at any point since at least 1999, the earliest year for which information about those younger than 18 is available in the CDC’s mortality database.

 

Religion and Deaths of Despair

Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American ReligionTyler Giles, Daniel M. Hungerman, and Tamar OostromNBER Working Paper No. 30840January 2023JEL No. I18,J11,Z12

Abstract:

In recent decades, death rates from poisonings, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease have dramatically increased in the United States. We show that these "deaths of despair" began to increase relative to trend in the early 1990s, that this increase was preceded by a decline in religious participation, and that both trends were driven by middle-aged white Americans. Using repeals of blue laws as a shock to religiosity, we confirm that religious practice has significant effects on these mortality rates. Our findings show that social factors such as organized religion can play an important role in understanding deaths of despair.

Coroners

Samantha Young at KHN:

When a group of physicians gathered in Washington state for an annual meeting, one made a startling revelation: If you ever want to know when, how — and where — to kill someone, I can tell you, and you’ll get away with it. No problem.

That’s because the expertise and availability of coroners, who determine cause of death in criminal and unexplained cases, vary widely across Washington, as they do in many other parts of the country.

“A coroner doesn’t have to ever have taken a science class in their life,” said Nancy Belcher, chief executive officer of the King County Medical Society, the group that met that day.

Her colleague’s startling comment launched her on a four-year journey to improve the state’s archaic death investigation system, she said. “These are the people that go in, look at a homicide scene or death, and say whether there needs to be an autopsy. They’re the ultimate decision-maker,” Belcher added.

Each state has its own laws governing the investigation of violent and unexplained deaths, and most delegate the task to cities, counties, and regional districts. The job can be held by an elected coroner as young as 18 or a highly trained physician appointed as medical examiner. Some death investigators work for elected sheriffs who try to avoid controversy or owe political favors. Others own funeral homes and direct bodies to their private businesses.

Overall, it’s a disjointed and chronically underfunded system — with more than 2,000 offices across the country that determine the cause of death in about 600,000 cases a year.

“There are some really egregious conflicts of interest that can arise with coroners,” said Justin Feldman, a visiting professor at Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.

...

The various titles used by death investigators don’t distinguish the discrepancies in their credentials. Some communities rely on coroners, who may be elected or appointed to their offices, and may — or may not — have medical training. Medical examiners, on the other hand, are typically doctors who have completed residencies in forensic pathology.

In 2009, the National Research Council recommended that states replace coroners with medical examiners, describing a system “in need of significant improvement.”

Massachusetts was the first state to replace coroners with medical examiners statewide in 1877. As of 2019, 22 states and the District of Columbia had only medical examiners, 14 states had only coroners, and 14 had a mix, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Life Expectancy Drops in 2021

Many posts have dealt with health policy, disease, mortality, and life expectancy.

Lenny Bernstein at WP:

U.S. life expectancy continued its steady, alarming decline in 2021, as covid-19 and illegal drugs took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, according to final government data released Thursday.

Even as some peer nations began to bounce back from the toll of the pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped to 76.4 years at birth, down from 77 in 2020, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That means Americans can expect to live as long as they did in 1996 — a dismal benchmark for a reliable measure of health that should rise steadily in an affluent, developed nation. (In August, using preliminary data, the agency had pegged life expectancy in 2021 at 76.1 years.)

...
The data reinforces a trend line of American longevity declining relative to that of its peer nations. A child born in the United States in 2019, for instance, could expect to live to 78.5, according to the World Health Organization, while a Japanese child born that year had a life expectancy of 84.5, Belgians lived to 81.4 and Swedes lived to 82.4.

...

The 2021 decline was the second consecutive drop for the United States and the continuation of a trend that began in the middle of the last decade, when “deaths of despair” — those caused by drug oerdoses, suicide and alcoholism — rose markedly.

It also contrasted with rebounding life expectancy rates in some other nations as they brought the covid pandemic under greater control with vaccines and masking. A study of 29 countries published in August in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that eight experienced significant life expectancy “bounce backs” in 2021.

Mortality in the United States, 2021 NCHS Data Brief No. 456, December 2022 Jiaquan Xu, M.D., Sherry L. Murphy, B.S., Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A., and Elizabeth Arias, Ph.D.

In 2021, a total of 3,464,231 resident deaths were registered in the United States—80,502 more deaths than in 2020. The number of deaths for which COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death increased 18.8% from 350,831 in 2020 to 416,893 in 2021. The age-adjusted death rate for the total population increased 5.3% in 2021 from 2020 after an increase of 16.8% from 2019 to 2020 (1). The decrease in life expectancy for the total population of 0.6 year from 2020 to 2021 was lower than the decline of 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020 (2). Age-specific death rates from 2020 to 2021 increased for each age group 1 year and over. Age-adjusted death rates decreased in 2021 from 2020 for Hispanic males and non-Hispanic Black males, remained unchanged statistically for non-Hispanic Asian males and non-Hispanic Asian females, and increased for all other race and ethnicity groups for both males and females.

Of the 10 leading causes of death in 2021, 9 remained the same as in 2020. Heart disease was the leading cause of death, followed by cancer and COVID-19. Age-adjusted death rates increased for 8 leading causes and decreased for 2. Life expectancy at birth decreased 0.6 year from 77.0 in 2020 to 76.4 in 2021, largely because of increases in mortality due to COVID-19, unintentional injuries, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, suicide, and homicide.

In 2021, 19,920 deaths occurred in children under age 1 year, which was 338 more infant deaths than in 2020. The change in the IMR from 2020 to 2021 was not statistically significant. Among the 10 leading causes of infant death, the decrease in IMR for one cause (low birth weight) was significant.

Data and findings in this report are based on final mortality data and may differ from provisional data and findings previously published.

Death by Party

Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham & Jason L. Schwartz, "Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic," NBER Working Paper 30512 ttp://www.nber.org/papers/w30512

Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat- leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.

Life Expectancy Drops Again

Kate Sheridan at STAT:

Americans born in 2021 can expect to live for just 76.1 years — the lowest life expectancy has been since 1996, according to a new government analysis published Wednesday. This is the biggest two-year decline — 2.7 years in total — in almost 100 years.

The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline. However, increases in the number of people dying from overdoses and accidents is also a significant factor.

American Indian and Alaskan Native people have experienced a particularly precipitous drop in life expectancy since 2019, going from 71.8 to 65.2 years. This kind of loss is similar to the plunge seen for all Americans after the Spanish Flu, said Robert Anderson, the chief of the mortality statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

...

This year’s life expectancy figure is 0.9 years lower than last year’s. Covid-19 accounted for about half of the decline, and a category encompassing accidents and unintentional injuries is responsible for another 16%. That category includes overdoses; in fact, about half of the unintentional injury deaths in this analysis were due to overdoses.
...

Not every demographic group saw the same changes, the researchers found. Asian-Americans have the highest life expectancy of any group — 83.5 years — and only saw a 0.1 year decline from 2020. Meanwhile, Black Americans lost 0.7 years between 2020 to 2021.

But American Indian and Native Americans saw the largest loss of life expectancy of all — 1.9 years less than 2020’s life expectancy, and 6.6 years less than 2019’s. They also had the lowest life expectancy among the groups studied. (Historically, Native Americans’ life expectancy has been staying level even in years when the life expectancy of the entire population did increase, one recent study found.)

Atlas Shrugged at COVID Death

From the House the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis:

For the past two years, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has been investigating the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to ensure the American people receive a full accounting of what went wrong and to determine what corrective steps are necessary to ensure our nation is better prepared for any future public health crisis.1 To those ends, the Select Subcommittee has conducted an exhaustive investigation into the extent to which senior Trump Administration officials undermined the federal public health response in an attempt to advance former President Donald Trump’s perceived political interests.

This report is the first installment of the Select Subcommittee’s findings showing that the Trump Administration’s political interference was rampant and degraded every major facet of the nation’s public health response during the first year of the pandemic. It is based on a series of transcribed interviews with senior officials involved in the federal government’s pandemic response, including White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir, and Special Advisor to the President Dr. Scott Atlas, as well as a review of thousands of pages of internal correspondence and other documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee.

This installment chronicles the Trump Administration’s embrace of a dangerous and discredited herd immunity via mass infection strategy as they failed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. New evidence obtained by the Select Subcommittee and released for the first time today reveals that support for this herd immunity strategy in the Trump White House was deeper and more wide-reaching than previously known. The embrace of this strategy enabled Trump Administration officials to convince themselves that they were right to do nothing to limit the spread of the virus in the second half of 2020 and likely resulted in many deaths that would have been prevented by an effective national mitigation strategy. 

... 

As the country was entering into the deadly fall and winter 2020 surge, Dr. Atlas continued to advocate against proven mitigation measures under the misguided premise that most regions of the country had already achieved sufficient disease-acquired herd immunity to prevent future surges.122 Despite an attempted intervention by multiple doctors on the White House Coronavirus Task Force with Vice President Pence’s office in November or December 2020 to warn about the deadly consequences if the Trump Administration did not take meaningful action to mitigate the virus’s spread, it appears that White House officials—after months of absorbing the “Atlas Dogma”—were largely unresponsive to these concerns. During the period from November 2020 through February 2021—as the deadly fall and winter surge swept across the country while the Trump Administration did little to curb its impact—the United States saw the most coronavirus deaths recorded in any four-month period throughout the entirety of the pandemic. 

The Trump Administration’s flagrant disregard for proven mitigation measures in those months resulted in a federal response that differed little from the implementation of a deliberate herd immunity strategy. Administration officials used the “Atlas Dogma” to justify their downplaying of the virus before the November presidential election and their continued deprioritization of the crisis as they worked to overturn the election results. The Administration’s embrace of this ill-advised approach not only impaired the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the pandemic at a critical juncture before the deployment of vaccines and widespread availability of effective treatments—it also helped to lay the foundation for a wide swath of the public to persistently reject other vital tools to combat the virus, including coronavirus vaccines.

Atlas predicted that COVID would take 10,000 lives.  He was off by a factor of 100.  The actual death toll has dropped one million and counting. 

Mass Shootings

 Many posts have discussed firearms and gun control.

Júlia Ledur and Kate Rabinowitz at WP:

Before a man killed at least four people Wednesday at a hospital in Tulsa, there had already been 232 mass shootings this year in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. It is the twentieth since last week’s shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., left 19 children and two teachers dead. 

Quoctrung Bui, Alicia Parlapiano and Margot Sanger-Katz at NYT:

If the key gun control proposals now being considered in Congress had been law since 1999, four gunmen younger than 21 would have been blocked from legally buying the rifles they used in mass shootings.

At least four other assailants would have been subject to a required background check, instead of slipping through a loophole. Ten might have been unable to steal their weapons because of efforts to require or encourage safer gun storage. And 20 might not have been allowed to legally purchase the large-capacity magazines that they used to upgrade their guns, helping them kill, on average, 16 people each.

Taken together, those four measures might have changed the course of at least 35 mass shootings — a third of such episodes in the United States since the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, a New York Times analysis has found. Those 35 shootings killed a combined 446 people.

Morning update:

At least three people were killed and 11 injured when multiple people opened fire in the busy South Street area of Philadelphia Saturday night, police said.

Watch CNN's @EvanMcS report on the most recent mass shooting here: https://t.co/QLjZA6JlmY

— CNN (@CNN) June 5, 2022

NEW

Three people died and 14 others were injured on Sunday after a shooting near a bar in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee.

(Shootings like this happen every weekend. People are just paying more attention now) https://t.co/wBlLclufyY

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) June 5, 2022

Military Fatalities

Find more statistics at Statista

Firearms and Death

IHME reports that mong high-income countries and territories with populations of 10 million or more, the US ranks first in firearm homicides.

From CDC:

Here's the Top 20 states in firearm mortality rate in 2020. https://t.co/VsDrRt399I https://t.co/bOYzRg42kM pic.twitter.com/p1kBIpGW7Y

— Adam Harstad (@AdamHarstad) May 25, 2022

One Million COVID Deaths in the US

 Carla K. Johnson at AP:

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 reached 1 million Monday, a once-unimaginable figure that only hints at the multitudes of loved ones and friends staggered by grief and frustration.

The number of dead, as tallied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, is equivalent to that of a 9/11 attack every day for 336 days. It is roughly equal to how many Americans died in the Civil War and World War II combined. It’s as if Boston and Pittsburgh were wiped out.

“It is hard to imagine a million people plucked from this Earth,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, who leads a new pandemic center at the Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, R.I. “It’s still happening and we are letting it happen.”

Three out of every four deaths were people 65 and older. More men died than women. White people made up most of the deaths overall, but Black, Latino and Native American people have been roughly twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as their white counterparts.

Australia's death rate is only one-tenth as great.  Damien Cave at NYT:

In global surveys, Australians were more likely than Americans to agree that “most people can be trusted” — a major factor, researchers found, in getting people to change their behavior for the common good to combat Covid, by reducing their movements, wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Partly because of that compliance, which kept the virus more in check, Australia’s economy has grown faster than America’s through the pandemic.

But of greater import, interpersonal trust — a belief that others would do what was right not just for the individual but for the community — saved lives. Trust mattered more than smoking prevalence, health spending or form of government, a study of 177 countries in The Lancet recently found. And in Australia, the process of turning trust into action began early.

...

During the toughest of Covid times, Australians showed that the national trait of “mateship” — defined as the bond between equal partners or close friends — was still alive and well. They saw Covid spiral out of control in the United States and Britain, and chose a different path.

Compliance rates with social distancing guidelines, along with Covid testing, contact tracing and isolation, held steady at around 90 percent during the worst early outbreaks, according to modeling from the University of Sydney. In the United States, reductions in mobility — a key measure of social distancing — were less stark, shorter and more inconsistent, based in part on location, political identity or wealth.

In Australia, rule-following was the social norm. It was Mick Fanning, a surfing superstar, who did not question the need to stay with his American wife and infant in a small hotel room for 14 days of quarantine after a trip to California. It was border officials canceling the visa of Novak Djokovic, the top male tennis player in the world, for failing to follow a Covid vaccine mandate, leading to his eventual deportation.

It was also all the Australians who lined up to get tested, who wore masks without question, who turned their phones into virus trackers with check-in apps, who set up food services for the old, infirm or poor in lockdowns, or who offered a place to stay to women who had been trapped in their homes with abusive husbands.

Two COVID Americas

Michael A. Stoto  ,Samantha Schlageter ,John D. Kraemer "COVID-19 mortality in the United States: It’s been two Americas from the start," PLOS One.  The abstract:

 During the summer of 2021, a narrative of "two Americas" emerged: one with high demand for the COVID-19 vaccine and the second with widespread vaccine hesitancy and opposition to masks and vaccines. We analyzed “excess mortality” rates (the difference between total deaths and what would have been expected based on earlier time periods) prepared by the CDC for the United States from January 3, 2020 to September 26, 2021. Between Jan. 3, 2020 and Sept. 26, 2021, there were 895,693 excess deaths associated with COVID-19, 26% more than reported as such. The proportion of deaths estimated by the excess mortality method that was reported as COVID-19 was highest in the Northeast (92%) and lowest in the West (72%) and South (76%). Of the estimated deaths, 43% occurred between Oct. 4, 2020 and Feb. 27, 2021. Before May 31, 2020, approximately 56% of deaths were in the Northeast, where 17% of the population resides. Subsequently, 48% of deaths were in the South, which makes up 38% of the population. Since May 31, 2020, the South experienced COVID-19 mortality 26% higher than the national rate, whereas the Northeast’s rate was 42% lower. If each region had the same mortality rate as the Northeast, more than 316,234 COVID-19 deaths between May 31, 2020 and Sept. 26, 2021 were "avoidable." More than half (63%) of the avoidable deaths occurred between May 31, 2020 and February, 2021, and more than half (60%) were in the South. Regional differences in COVID-19 mortality have been strong throughout the pandemic. The South has had higher mortality rates than the rest of the U.S. since May 31, 2020, and experienced 62% of the avoidable deaths. A comprehensive COVID-19 policy, including population-based restrictions as well as vaccines, is needed to control the pandemic.