The CDC gets life expectancy wildly wrong
According to a CDC spokesman, U.S. life expectancy has fallen by a year as a result of Covid. A little arithmetic shows that that cannot be close to correct.
Total deaths so far are about 500,000 out of a population of about 330,000,000. The average death cost 12 years of life. Multiply that out and the average person lost not one year but .018 year of life.That's an error of almost two orders of magnitude. Including deaths indirectly caused and additional deaths over the next few months might increase it a little, but there is no way it can be one year or even close.
Dr. Peter Bach explains the error on his blog. What the CDC apparently did was to calculate what the effect on life expectancy would be if mortality rates stayed at their 2020 level, how much Covid would reduce life expectancy if the pandemic was repeated every year forever.
After an error of that magnitude, it is difficult to take seriously any factual claim they make. It will be interesting to see if they admit the error.
P.S. To be fair, I have not found the claim on the CDC web site, only in media reports that attribute it to "Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC."
P.P.S. I have now found it on the CDC web site in the form of an interview with Elizabeth Arias, who apparently produced the number:
https://www.cdc.gov/.../podcasts/2021/20210219/20210219.htm
I posted a version of this to FaceBook. Some people defended the CDC on the grounds that the usual way of calculating life expectancy is by measuring the current mortality rate as a function of age and projecting it it into the future. The problem is that, as you can see by the interview, Elizabeth Arias makes no attempt to explain that what she is describing is a measure that she knows, in this case, badly misrepresents what it is supposed to be measuring.