> While the pandemic has driven most of the decline in life expectancy, a rise in accidental deaths and drug overdoses also contributed, as did deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, the new report found.
They proposed the greater loss in minority life expectancy as being driven by "systemic racism as well as inadequacies in the US handling of the pandemic." What that's supposed to mean was never stated. The next sentence reflected upon a higher rate of non-minority deaths the following year which the paper claimed "likely has multiple explanations." None of those possible explanations were offered.
They concluded with offering an estimated life expectancy in America of 76.44 for 2021. The final official numbers from the UN numbers ended up with 77.2.
[1] - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf
The paragraph I quoted is drawing from the chart on page 5.