A pair of reports released this week illustrate the deep and lasting impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the United States, documenting both the decline in academic outcomes for young students as well as a sharp decline in life expectancy for Americans in general.
A special assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) focused on a nationally representative sample of 9-year-olds and documented the steepest drop in reading performance between 2019, the year before to the pandemic, and the first few months of 2022. It also documented the first decline in math performance over the same period.
A separate report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documented a further decline in life expectancy in the US, first identified in 2021. According to the findings, the average life expectancy of Americans fell in almost one year from 2020 to 2021 and in 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021.
As the country heads into its third winter of the pandemic, the two studies show that while Americans have, to one degree or another, returned to normal life despite the pandemic, its effects will continue for months and years. to come.
students face problems
Educators have been concerned about the impact the transition to virtual learning had on students, as many schools closed in-person classes for much of 2020 and 2021. This prompted the National Center for Education Statistics to conduct its special assessment on children. 9 years old.
“We have all been concerned about the short-term and long-term impacts of the pandemic on our children,” Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said in a statement accompanying the findings.
“There has been a lot of speculation about how closed schools and disrupted learning may have affected students’ learning opportunities,” he said. “Our own data reveals the pandemic’s toll on education in other ways, including increases in students seeking mental health services, absenteeism, school violence and disruption, cyberbullying, and teacher and staff shortages across the country.”
The NAEP report looks at change in academic proficiency overall, but also change within specific groups. To do this, divide the student population into those who scored at the 90th percentile or higher, and those at the 75th, 50th, 25th, and 10th percentiles.
The study found declines in both math and reading proficiency at all percentiles. However, they were higher among those in the lower percentiles. That means kids in the 10th percentile not only showed lower proficiency than those in higher percentiles in 2022, but they performed worse than other kids in the 10th percentile in 2019.
“The disruptions from COVID-19 may have exacerbated many of the challenges we were already facing,” Carr said. “We know that students who are struggling the most have fallen further behind their peers.”
life expectancy drops
In 2019, the year before the pandemic, the life expectancy of the average American was 79 years. However, according to data released by the CDC this week, that had dropped to just over 76 years by 2021, two years into the pandemic. It was a precipitous drop for the general population and it was much worse for specific demographic groups.
The decline was most pronounced among Native Americans and Alaska Natives, whose life expectancy, already low at 71.8 years in 2019, had dropped to 65.2 years in 2021. The average life expectancy of African Americans fell in four years, from 74.8 in 2019 to 70.8 in 2021.
During the same period, the life expectancy of Hispanic Americans fell from 81.9 to 77.7 years, while that of Asian Americans fell from 85.6 to 83.5. The life expectancy of white Americans fell from 78.8 years to 76.4 years.
The “vast majority” of the decline is due to the pandemic.
Noreen Goldman, the Hughes-Rogers professor of demography and public affairs at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, told the VOA that the “vast majority” of the decline is due to the pandemic.
He said much of the blame lies with a disjointed and ineffective public health response to COVID-19, even after effective vaccines became available and successful mitigation techniques were identified.
“That put the United States in this horrible situation of unforgivable loss of life expectancy, which I think is disgraceful,” he said.
However, Goldman noted that other factors were also at play.
“The United States has had a worse life expectancy than its peers, other high-income countries, for a long time,” he said. “The shorter life expectancy is accompanied by higher rates of chronic disease, higher rates of heart disease, cancer and diabetes, the highest rate of obesity in the world.”
In a study published by The Lancet earlier this year, researchers looked at declining life expectancies in 29 countries between 2019 and 2020. The countries included most of Europe, as well as Chile and the US. The study found that the decline in life expectancy in the US during that period was greater than in any other country.
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