I have often wondered how the US compares to other countries when it comes to health and longevity. So I found this dataset on Kaggle and created a story in Tableau to show the results of my findings.
In a surprise to few, Japan ranked #1 as the country with the longest life expectancy for its people at 82.5 years. The country with the shortest life expectancy was Sierra Leone at 46 years, according to this dataset. When comparing the top 10 counties to the bottom 10, box and whisker plots showed that there was far more variability and wider outliers in the bottom 10. The top 10 had more compact ranges and outliers in the mid to late eighties.
Countries with longer life expectancy showed that people had more years of education on average and their governments usually spent more on health. However, Sierra Leone was the exception and spent almost as much as Sweden, who ranked first in government spending. Another interesting find was that a good portion of countries with lower life expectancy also drank less alcohol than many countries with the longest lives.
The US has an average life expectancy of 78 years. The US has about the same number of adult deaths per 1,000 population as Japan, but we have much higher child and infant mortality. We spend 15.86% of government funding on healthcare, but we are not listed in the top ten countries with long lives!
BRITTANY MORIN 