The COVID-19 pandemic's effect on US life expectancy has disproportionately hit minorities, according to new studies in BMJ and JAMA Network Open, with the former finding that overall US life expectancy—which dropped almost 2 years from 2018 to 2020—hasn't been this low since 1943, during World War II."I've been studying the US health disadvantage for many years right now," says Laudan Aron, MA, co-author of the BMJ study and senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. "But it's always still a little shocking and distressing to see the numbers and just to see how exceptional and different we really are from so many other societies, which really kind of points to the fact that what we're witnessing is really a set of choices