AILSA CHANG, HOST: This week's news about life expectancy in the U.S. and how it dropped overall in 2020 echoes a sobering pattern that we saw all through the pandemic. Latino and Black people were hit the hardest. Life expectancy fell about three years for both groups, compared to 1.2-year drop for white people. We should note, the CDC's data on this didn't include Asian Americans or other racial or ethnic groups. But overall, COVID-19 deaths played the largest role in the life expectancy drop. Dr. Alicia Fernandez at the University of California, San Francisco, has seen the impact on the Bay Area's Black and brown communities firsthand. She studies what's called excess mortality across the state, and she joins us now.