If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens.
To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy.
Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome.
But to you, it's 1.2 either way.
It might be useful to tone down any highly idiomatic usage of English here, because this sounds very weird.
edit: sort of has this vibe. me: "I was sad when my grandmother died" hn: "WAAAAYYY off there, buddy."
I'll wait for you to figure that one out.
1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened.
Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible".
I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy.
Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?
And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year.
When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal.
Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.