It is a well known fact that Native Americans experienced disproportionately high rates of deaths from COVID-19 due to poverty, crowded housing, high rates of chronic disease, employment in frontline jobs, and limited access to quality health care.

Less is known about the pandemic's effects on life expectancy for this population, which makes up 2% of the U.S. population.

As per Science Daily, Noreen Goldman of Princeton University and Theresa Andrasfay, Ph.D. '20 of the University of Southern California investigated life expectancy at birth in 2020 and 2021 -- when COVID-19 rates were surging -- compared to 2019.

The findings state that the pandemic set Native Americans further behind other major racial and ethnic groups in terms of life expectancy. For a high-income country, these figures are shockingly low, the researchers said, and far below every country in the Americas except for Haiti.

The estimated loss in life expectancy at birth for Native Americans is 4.5 years in 2020 and 6.4 years in 2021 relative to 2019. The pandemic reduced Native American life expectancy at birth from the already low 72 years in 2019 to about 67 years in 2020 and about 65 years in 2021 for both sexes combined.

Native Americans experienced a loss in life expectancy at birth in 2020 that is more than three years above that for whites and 1.5 years above losses for Black and Latino populations.

It is disheartening to see that not enough people are talking about this!