Just in case we need another metric to believe that the U.S. is slipping behind its peers, there is this new study from Lancet, summarized in a Quartz article:

…if the US had a life expectancy equal to the average of countries of comparable wealth (in the study, the group is identified as G7 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, and US), its population would be nearly half a million more.

It’s not a new phenomenon. The US has trailed the rest of the advanced world in life expectancy since the 1980s, and it’s now 3.4 years shorter than the average of other G7 countries in 2018, the last year for which international data is available. On average, in 2018, people in G7 countries had a life expectancy of 81.9 years, while in the US (prior to Covid-19) it was 78.5 years. In 2018 in Japan, the G7 country with the highest life expectancy, it was 84.2 years.

Quartz

Note that the average we are comparing the U.S. to presumably includes the U.S., so the gap between the U.S. and its peers would be even slightly worse if we were just comparing the U.S. to the average of its peers. Japanese people are living 5-6 years longer than us, on average. This is before Covid-19, of course. Checking Our World in Data, Japan has a reported death rate from Covid-19 of about 55 per million population, and the U.S. of about 1,500 per million population! (I don’t use exclamation points lightly on this blog.)