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U.S. life expectancy fell by 2 yrs in 2020, sharpest drop among high-income peers (msn.com)
<p data-t=”{"n":"blueLinks"}”>Life expectancy in the United States fell by nearly two years in 2020 to about 77 years amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the sharpest drop compared to 19 other high-income countries.</p>
<p data-t=”{"n":"blueLinks"}”>Americans, on average, had a life expectancy of 76.99 years in 2020, down from 78.86 years in 2019, according to the study, which looked at national death and population counts in 2019 and 2020, as well as provisional data for 2021 to calculate mortality rate ratios.</p> -
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https://www.addictionpolicy.org/post/the-fentanyl-crisis-is-only-getting-worse
This is from just about when we went into COVID lockdown. US life expectancy reversed in 2018, and started trending down. COVID has accelerated this trend, but the real culprit is despair (and fentanyl). Suicide and fentanyl / opiod overdoses have increased for those under 55 by so much that it is lowering life expectancy. There will likely be a bump up after COVID is under control. I expect life expectancy to start trending downward again after that because 1) the diabetes / obesity wave; 2) if fentanyl / opiods continue flooding into the country, and cities keep pursuing ineffective homelessness policies, there will be more deaths; and 3) let’s keep passing neuroses and mental illness on our children.
https://nida.nih.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
The 2021 and 2022 numbers (so far) are astounding.
Teen numbers are really bad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/EWoodhouse7/status/1481491026556694528
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US life expectancy reversed in 2018, and started trending down. COVID has accelerated this trend, but the real culprit is despair (and fentanyl). Suicide and fentanyl / opioid overdoses have increased for those under 55 by so much that it is lowering life expectancy.
I’m 59 years old. I graduated in a class of 800 in 1984. Three of my classmates have taken their own life, one just yesterday, one in 2008 and one in 2015. One I didn’t know at all, one was an acquaintance, one was a close friend. One woman, two men.
Three out of 800, and I haven’t paid much attention. Could be more. Over the 38 years since we’ve graduated, that’s an annualized rate of about 9.9 per 100,000 which is not too far off from the current annual suicide rate of 13.5 per 100,000 (up from 10.4 per 100k in 2020). Of course, I don’t know if any of my other classmates have taken their own lives, so I could be understating the figure.
Depressing to think about. Teens and middle aged men, two of the most susceptible demographic groups. One friend of mine lost his hearing after contracting COVID. He’s very depressed, I worry about him a lot.
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There was an Atlantic article on the mass of suicides between 2009 and 2015 at Gunn and Palo Alto High school, about 4-5 times the national average.
The Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools – The Atlantic
A telling paragraph:
Had parents really given their kids the idea that they had to perform? That their love had to be earned with A’s and Advanced Placement tests and trophies? They hadn’t meant to. Yet there, from one of their own kids, was the rebuke that in this community, no place or time or language existed that allowed kids to be vulnerable, much less broken, or even just to be: “We love our moms and we love our dads,” Martha said. “But calm down.”
Uh…yeah.
My son graduated in 2010 and was friendly with a number of Gunn and Paly kids. One of his friends, a straight-A student, brought home a B+ mid-term grade. He found out about it when he had a 102 degree fever. Didn’t stop his parents who howled at him for three hours.
Yes, Tiger Moms, helicopter parents, however you want to describe them…they exist and thrive in Silicon Valley.
This isn’t new, by the way. In the 1980s, Mrs. Mick taught 1st grade at a Palo Alto grade school that catered to the sons and daughters of Stanford students. Each year, she’d send out a questionnaire to the parents, asking what they wanted their children to learn that year — in first grade. Her first year, one parent wrote back that she wanted her child to have a thorough grounding in biology, chemistry and physics. For her seven year old.
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“Each year, she’d send out a questionnaire to the parents, asking what they wanted their children to learn that year — in first grade. Her first year, one parent wrote back that she wanted her child to have a thorough grounding in biology, chemistry and physics. For her seven year old.”
I imagine that if Ms. Mick repeated her surveys now the results would be quite different? Parents now surely want their first graders to focus on the kids’ sexual identity, LGBTQ family relationships, CRT, institutional racism and white privilege. Biology, chemistry & physics is so last century.
Here's a toast with one last pour, may it last forever and a minute more;
Good fortune seems to you have sung, to live and love way past long -
We took away a bunch of people’s support structures and access to healthy coping measures and shamed them if they sought them out, barred them from in-person (or any) treatment, school, jobs, sports, gyms.🤷🏻♀️ https://t.co/I1JjbAiXw2
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) April 21, 2022
Ms. Hammer is correct. Dr. Wen, who helped peddle masking, lockdowns, etc., is also correct, but has zero self-awareness of the why, which is plainly obvious. If you make the cure worse than the disease (especially true during Omicron), this is the result. We have yet to see the ramifications of how we treated children.
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“Each year, she’d send out a questionnaire to the parents, asking what they wanted their children to learn that year — in first grade. Her first year, one parent wrote back that she wanted her child to have a thorough grounding in biology, chemistry and physics. For her seven year old.” I imagine that if Ms. Mick repeated her surveys now the results would be quite different? Parents now surely want their first graders to focus on the kids’ sexual identity, LGBTQ family relationships, CRT, institutional racism and white privilege. Biology, chemistry & physics is so last century.
Ironically, in the city of Palo Alto, you may be 100% correct.
Mrs. Mick stopped teaching in 1991. Arrival of son #1 was one part of the reason, large class size was another part of the reason, the fact that there were four separate demographic groups in the classroom (children of Stanford professors, East Palo Alto children who did not have an operating school in EPA in 1991, English as a Second Language students and “regular”) was a third part of the reason. But the single greatest reason she no longer teaches is that she spent 50% of her time on 10% of the kids. She said she’d still be teaching if she could have four vetos a year… “You, you, you and you…out.”
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