US life expectancy at birth

Indian filmmakers stopped certifying films while Americans stopped living as long, which is the kind of sentence that reminds you the universe has no particular editorial standards. Both curves fell. Both fell in the same year. The reason, regrettably, is the obvious one.

Both cratered in 2020 for direct covid reasons. US life expectancy dropped by roughly 1.8 years — the steepest single-year decline since 1943 — as covid deaths loaded the actuarial tables, while Indian film production halted so completely that the certification board ran nearly out of films to process. One curve measures who died; the other measures what didn't get made. Both are the pandemic, priced differently.

So the correlation is the virus counted twice, on two different ledgers. One in mortality. One in cinema. Both paid in 2020.