Life expectancy in the United States dropped by a year-and-a-half in 2020 versus a year prior, researchers said Wednesday. The decrease of life expectancy at birth from 78.8 years to 77.3 years was largely attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated America and many other countries. “The decline in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 can primarily be attributed to deaths from the pandemic. COVID deaths accounted for nearly 75 percent of the decline. More than 609,000 Americans have died in the pandemic so far, roughly 375,000 of those lives were lost last year,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a statement. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Cases of the illness first appeared in China in late 2019 and in America soon after. The report detailing the statistics (pdf) came from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the …