A woman sits outside a coffee shop on a business street in Burlingame, California, the United States, Feb. 16, 2021. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling)

"This is a huge decline," said Robert Anderson, who oversees the data for the CDC. "You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this."

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 (Xinhua) -- Life expectancy in the United States plummeted by an entire year in the first half of 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, the biggest decline since World War II, said a study on Thursday.

Preliminary data from January through June 2020 showed life expectancy at birth for the total U.S. population fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.8 years, the lowest since 2006, according to the study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.