The average American lifespan keeps getting shorter, even as comparably rich countries rebound and recover after Covid-19

即使相对富裕的国家在新冠疫情后反弹和复苏,美国人的平均寿命越来越短。

Recently, National Public Radio (NPR) in the US published a story titled 'Live free and die? The sad state of US life expectancy’ that explored the great divide between the United States and peer countries on life expectancy.
While most countries experienced a dip during the Covid-19 pandemic and rebounded after vaccines and other treatments were rolled out, American life expectancy has essentially fallen off a cliff and never came back.

最近,美国国家公共广播电台(NPR)发表了一篇题为《自由地活着,然后死去?》美国预期寿命的悲惨状况,探索了美国和其他国家在预期寿命上的巨大差距。
虽然大多数国家在疫情期间经历了衰退,但在疫苗和其他治疗方法推出后反弹,美国人的预期寿命实际上已经跌下了悬崖,而且再也没有回来。

The graph published by NPR is shocking. It shows that US life expectancy is lower than in Cuba or Lebanon. The number has been known since just before Christmas when health officials announced that the country’s life expectancy had dropped starkly for a second year in a row to 76 years.
However, last week more bad news arrived after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that maternal mortality in the country reached a high in 2021. And another paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found rising mortality rates among US children and adolescents. This means you can’t blame Covid-19 exclusively for the drop in life expectancy and assume it’ll jump right back up as soon as the pandemic is finally dealt with.

美国国家公共电台发布的图表令人震惊。报告显示,美国人的预期寿命低于古巴或黎巴嫩。这一数字在圣诞节前就已知晓,当时卫生官员宣布该国的预期寿命连续第二年大幅下降至76岁。
然而,上周传来了更多的坏消息,美国疾病控制和预防中心(CDC)宣布,该国的孕产妇死亡率在2021年达到了高点。《美国医学会杂志》的另一篇论文发现,美国儿童和青少年的死亡率正在上升。这意味着你不能把预期寿命的下降完全归咎于新冠病毒,并认为一旦疫情最终得到解决,预期寿命就会反弹。

The rate of maternal deaths in 2021 was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, which is more than ten times higher than some other high-income countries, including Australia, Austria, Israel, Japan and Spain which all had rates between 2 and 3 deaths per 100,000 in 2020.
Regarding childrens’ increased mortality rate, Steven Woolf, the lead author of the JAMA paper and director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University put it quite succinctly. “This is the first time in my career that I've ever seen [an increase in pediatric mortality] – it's always been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember. Now, it's increasing at a magnitude that has not occurred for at least half a century.”

2021年的孕产妇死亡率为每10万活产死亡32.9人,比其他一些高收入国家高出十倍以上,包括澳大利亚、奥地利、以色列、日本和西班牙,这些国家2020年的孕产妇死亡率均在每10万活产死亡2至3人之间。
关于儿童死亡率的上升,《美国医学会杂志》论文的主要作者、弗吉尼亚联邦大学社会与健康中心名誉主任史蒂文·伍尔夫说得很简洁。“在我的职业生涯中,这是我第一次看到(儿童死亡率的增加)——自从我有记忆以来,美国的儿童死亡率一直在下降。现在,它正在以至少半个世纪以来从未出现过的规模增长。”

The paper notes that this goes far beyond stereotypes of Americans having poor eating habits or other unhealthy addictions. It found that “American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries.” It continues stating that “even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries.”
The researchers cataloged what they described as the “US health disadvantage,” which essentially means that just living in the country is worse for your health and makes you die younger than in other comparable countries. Given the recent environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, where droves of carcinogenic chemicals were allowed to burn freely in the air and deposit into the soil, this may also be part of the explanation. The incident also has impacted a major metropolitan area and my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.

这篇论文指出,这远远超出了人们对美国人不良饮食习惯或其他不健康嗜好的刻板印象。研究发现,“美国儿童比其他高收入国家的儿童更不可能活到5岁。”报告继续指出,“即使是行为健康的美国人,例如那些不肥胖或不吸烟的人,他们的患病率似乎也高于其他国家的同龄人。”
研究人员将他们所谓的“美国健康劣势”进行了分类,这基本上意味着仅仅生活在这个国家对你的健康更不利,而且会让你比其他可比国家的人死得更早。考虑到最近发生在俄亥俄州东巴勒斯坦的环境灾难,大量致癌化学物质被允许在空气中自由燃烧并沉积到土壤中,这也可能是部分原因。这一事件还影响了一个主要的大都市地区,以及我的家乡俄亥俄州辛辛那提市。

Additionally, right now residents of one of the largest American cities, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, are being told to drink bottled water because more than 8,000 gallons of latex-finishing solution spilled into Otter Creek in Bristol, near Philadelphia, on March 24th. Some of the chemicals in the spill include butyl acrylate, just as those released in East Palestine. It seems that such environmental disasters are becoming more frequent.
Perhaps the most baffling statistic, at least for a non-American, is that since 2020, gunfire has been the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the US, surpassing even car crashes, which had previously topped the list. Almost 20% of all deaths of Americans aged one to 18 who died in the past three years were gun-related. Compared to other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US is the only country where guns are the leading cause of death for people in this age bracket – no other nation even has it in the top four.

此外,美国最大的城市之一,宾夕法尼亚州费城的居民被告知要喝瓶装水,因为3月24日,超过8000加仑的乳胶整理液流入费城附近布里斯托尔的水獭溪。泄漏的一些化学物质包括丙烯酸丁酯,就像在东巴勒斯坦释放的那些一样。这样的环境灾难似乎越来越频繁。
也许最令人困惑的统计数据是,至少对非美国人来说,自2020年以来,枪击一直是美国儿童和年轻人死亡的主要原因,甚至超过了此前位居榜首的车祸。在过去三年里,美国1至18岁的死亡人口中,近20%与枪支有关。与经济合作与发展组织的其他国家相比,美国是唯一一个枪支是这一年龄段人群死亡主要原因的国家,其他国家甚至都没有进入前四名。

Be it the stereotypical bad eating habits and endemic obesity, increasingly frequent environmental disasters, or the scourge of gun violence, there is indeed a “disadvantage” to simply existing in the US. As a consequence, as I can attest, more and more young Americans are looking to settle down in other countries – rather than wait for lawmakers to actually do something to protect the people from these dangers.
In the end, whether it’s Republicans sounding the alarm over the opioid crisis and rising drug deaths, or Democrats shouting themselves hoarse about the need for stricter gun laws to curb the disastrous gun-death stats, what most of them are interested in first and foremost is scoring points against each other. Actually helping their constituents comes as an afterthought.

无论是刻板的不良饮食习惯和地方性肥胖,越来越频繁的环境灾难,还是枪支暴力的祸害,对于仅仅在美国生存确实是一种“劣势”。因此,正如我可以证明的那样,越来越多的美国年轻人正寻求在其他国家定居,而不是等待立法者采取实际行动来保护人们免受这些危险。
最后,无论是共和党人对阿片类药物危机和不断上升的毒品死亡人数发出警告,还是民主党人大声疾呼需要更严格的枪支法律,以遏制灾难性的枪支死亡数据,他们中的大多数人首先感兴趣的是互相得分。实际上,帮助他们的选民是事后的想法。

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