CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Recent studies have found that life expectancy is continuing to decline in the United States. After falling nearly 1.9 years in 2020, life expectancy decreased by another .44 years in 2021.
We were joined by Dr. Gregg Silverman to discuss the impact of the pandemic, and what these shifting trends meant.
We asked, what were your takeaways from the survey?
"The takeaways were how devastating the COVID-19 pandemic was, that it really dropped the entire [average]..." Dr. Silverman said.
"[COVID] increased the risk of death over the large population, and decreased life expectancy as an average across the population as well." he explained.
It's a grim outlook, and in turn we wanted to know what we could do to improve the situation.
"I think if there's any positive to be said, it's that the death rate from COVID is going down." said Dr. Silverman.
"There's no question that the omicron variant is a little bit less problematic than was the delta variant, or even the original variants when we didn't have any kind of immunity or vaccines before this."
"Now it turns out if you look at the data on COVID, it looks like most people have been at least exposed to COVID, and so they do have some antibodies and resistance to whatever the next COVID round is going to be."
"And that's a positive," Dr. Silverman assured.
"It turns out that those people who have already had COVID have as long an immunity to COVID as those people who take the vaccine. So that's a positive."
So what does this data and shift in trend mean for our life expectancy? Dr. Silverman addressed how we rank in relation to the rest of the world.
"We're still in the top 15 or 20 - as far as life expectancy goes. So we're not quite up there with Japan or Hong Kong, but we're not down there with Swaziland or the Congo. We're toward the top."
With COVID as such a present threat to American life expectancy, we asked Dr. Silverman a bit about new reports of a nasal-spray vaccine, and if he thought that would be helpful in reaching vaccine-hesitant people.
"Yes, I think it'd be for those people who are resistant to the shots," said Dr. Silverman.
But Dr. Silverman thinks that the issue might not lie in the delivery method of the life-saving vaccine.
"But I think a lot of problems are that this is a political problem rather than a medical problem," said Dr. Silverman "And people have been handling [COVID] like it's a political problem, which it's not."
For Dr. Silverman, the declining life expectancy is a sign that, "Mistakes have been made on all sides of this."
"I think you have to have some direction as far as where you wanna go," said Dr. Silverman. "I think that's been a problem, and that comes from the politicians. And I think the scientific edge of this has to be addressed as well."
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