Regaining years that COVID took: NYC life expectancy dropped of 4.6 years in one year and how to build it back up

New York Daily News, The (NY)

Last Monday, President Biden signed into law a joint resolution passed by Congress terminating the national coronavirus emergency declared by President Trump on March 13, 2020. On Friday, intentionally or not, Gov. Hochul didn’t issue her weekly COVID update, which replaced the daily updates that began in the beginning. And in a bit more than three weeks, on May 11, Biden and the CDC will end the public health emergency.

So yes, after three years, COVID is subsiding, but its toll was savage, especially here in New York, where it hit first and hardest. The city’s 2020 death rate was 50% higher than in 2019 and the citywide life expectancy in 2020 was only 78 years, a drop of 4.6 years from the 2019 statistic of 82.6 years.

While COVID and future pandemics can’t be fully guarded against (although masks, social distancing, and vaccines are very effective), New York and Mayor Adams can, and should, take proactive public health steps to extend life expectancy.

Vaccines must be continued for old viruses, like measles and polio, and new ones like for COVID, which is still killing people daily. COVID should be added to the routine childhood vaccines. This is a public health measure, not a political statement

Opioids, whether laced or not with poison fentanyl, are taking too many lives of New Yorkers and proactive steps must be taken to reduce the drug’s use and make it safer for addicts. Expanding the number of overdose prevention centers, which have proven their lifesaving success, should be easy, but it still hasn’t happened.

Suicide is another preventable cause of death that can be reduced through intervention. And, as always, gunplay is killing people who didn’t have to die. On other fronts, Adams has long made fighting diabetes and obesity a priority. A state ban on flavored tobacco, pushed by Hochul, can only help. And why not try to curb alcohol use?

Added together, New York can work to boost back our life expectancy and make those lives healthier at the same time.