The life expectancy of American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) people is thought to have fallen by nearly five years between 2019 and 2021, the biggest decline of any ethnic group in the US during the covid-19 pandemic.
In 2021, at Virginia Commonwealth University and his colleagues calculated that the overall life expectancy of people in the US 鈥� 8.5 times the decline seen in other high-income countries. The AIAN population was excluded from the analysis, however, due to a lack of accurate mortality data, as many deceased people in this group are misclassified as on death certificates.
In April, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released , based on 2019 data. This estimates how many more years a person would be expected to live at a given age, taking into account the high level of misclassification on death certificates for AIAN people.
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Based on this table, Woolf and his team modelled any changes in life expectancy that occurred between 2019 and 2021 for the AIAN population. They then did the same for other ethnic groups.
Since covid-19 emerged at the end of 2019, the life expectancy of AIAN people has fallen by an estimated 4.71 years, compared with 3.7 years for Black people and 2.1 years for white people. When the researchers added data from the AIAN population into their original life expectancy data for the US, they found that overall life expectancy in the country fell by 2.41 years.
鈥淎ll communities of colour in the US suffer from multiple sources of health inequities,鈥� says Woolf. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a big problem with access to healthcare. The problem for the Native American population is compounded by the fact that they often live in tribal communities where healthcare resources are even more limited.鈥�
AIAN populations may also experience high poverty rates, says Woolf.聽 鈥淭hey are more likely to live in crowded conditions and therefore have an increased exposure to the virus,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey are also more likely to have comorbidities which are likely to increase the risk of complication from covid-19.鈥�
at the Colorado School of Public Health says the findings were predictable. 鈥淪adly, given the social determinants of health that plague the lives of Native people, this observation is not surprising,鈥� he says.
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