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Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. had begun to drop. So U.S. residents today are doing worse compared with our own past, but how are we doing compared with peer nations? Investigators addressed that question by comparing mortality and years of life lost (based on age at time of death) in the U.S. with those rates in 21 other affluent nations, from 1933 to 2021. As shown in the , from 1933 until the mid-1960s, U.S. mortality was lower than that of its peers. However, since the early 1980s, actual death rates in the U.S. have grown progressively higher. The investigators call the people who would not have died — had U.S. rates matched those of peer nations — the “missing Americans.” Not surprisingly, the “mi…