Black Americans faced a staggering 1.6million excess deaths over the last two decades compared to White people, a new study has found.
A study published in the medical journal JAMA found the Black population in the US experienced more than 1.63 million excess deaths compared to the White population from 1999 to 2020.
According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, excess deaths are normally defined as the "difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods."
Authors in the journal, which was published on Tuesday, wrote: "After a period of progress in reducing disparities, improvements stalled, and differences between the Black population and the white population worsened in 2020.
"Heart disease had the highest excess mortality rates, and the excess years of potential life lost rates were largest among infants and middle-aged adults."
More than 80 million excess years of life have been lost in comparison to the White population due to heart disease in men and women, and cancer in males.
Dr Harlan Krumholz, an author of the study with Yale School of Medicine, said an enormous amount of years were lost at a young age.
He told CBS: "All the disadvantage that Black people incur ends up being translated both at very young ages and in middle age and older age into enormous amounts of years lost in early death.
"And this is really, I think, something that's unacceptable.
"People aren't born predetermined that their life expectancies are going to be shorter, but by where they live, the exposures that they have, the way the medical care system treats them simply because of their race."
He also pointed to a study in 2020 which showed Covid as a leading cause of death on black Americans after it showed to have the highest mortality rate among black men that year.
It was also the second-highest, after heart disease, among black women in the US.
Dr Krumholz said: "It led us back to a situation where we were no better than we were 20 years ago.
"These are preventable deaths and it's just up to us to configure society in a way that's responsive to the needs of this community and can recognize our obligation to eliminate these disparities "
The authors believe the study shows there needs to be an urgency in closing the disparities - especially on children.
They wrote: "The sobering disparity noted in this study among infants and during childhood accounted for a markedly elevated number of excess deaths and an even more pronounced disparity in years of potential life lost."
Dr. Henning Tiemeier, the director of Harvard's Maternal Health Task Force, told CBS last year determining the cause of that racial disparity poses "essentially one of the biggest challenges of public health."
