NEW YORK – Life expectancy in the US fell for the second year in a row in 2021, falling almost a year from 2020according to a government report published on Wednesday.
In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, estimated American life expectancy has shortened by almost three years. The last comparable decline occurred in the early 1940s, during the height of World War II.
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blamed COVID-19 for about half the decline in 2021, a year when vaccines were widely available but new coronavirus variants caused waves of hospitalizations and deaths. Other contributors to the decline are long-standing problems: drug overdose, heart disease, suicide, and chronic liver disease.
“It is a depressing situation. It used to be bad and it’s gotten worse,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania.
Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year could expect to live, given the mortality rates at that time. It’s “the most fundamental indicator of population health in this country,” said Robert Hummer, a University of North Carolina researcher focused on population health patterns.
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Life expectancy in the US has increased for decades, but progress stalled before the pandemic.
It was 78 years and 10 months in 2019. In 2020, it dropped to 77 years. Last year, she fell to about 76 years, 1 month.
The last time it was this low was in 1996.
Declines during the pandemic were worse for some racial groups, and some gaps widened. For example, the life expectancy of American Indians and Alaska Natives has seen a decline of more than 6 1/2 years since the pandemic began, to 65 years. In the same period, life expectancy for Asian Americans fell by about two years to 83 1/2.
Experts say there are many possible reasons for such differences, including lack of access to quality health care, lower vaccination rates, and a higher proportion of the population in low-paying jobs that forced them to keep working when the pandemic was raging. his worst moment.
The new report is based on provisional data. Life expectancy estimates may change with the addition of more data and more analysis. For example, the CDC initially said that life expectancy in 2020 was reduced by about 1 year and 6 months. But after more death reports and analyzes came in, it ended up being around 1 year and 10 months.
But the declines in 2020 and 2021 are likely to remain as the first two consecutive years of decline in US life expectancy since the early 1960s, CDC officials said.
Findings in the report:
–The life expectancy of women in the United States fell about 10 months, from just under 80 years in 2020 to just over 79 in 2021. The life expectancy of men fell a full year, from about 74 years to 73.
–Deaths from COVID-19 were the main reason for the decline. The second largest contributor was accidental injury deaths, primarily from drug overdoses, which killed a record 107,000 Americans last year.
–Whites saw the second-largest drop among racial and ethnic groups, with life expectancy falling one year, to about 76 years, 5 months. African Americans had the third largest decline, falling more than eight months, to 70 years, 10 months
–Hispanic Americans had seen a big drop in life expectancy in 2020: four years. But in 2021, life expectancy for them dropped by about two months, to about 77 years and 7 months. Preston thinks good vaccination rates among Hispanics played a role.
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The report also suggests that gains against suicide are unraveling.
Suicides in the US rose from the early 2000s through 2018. But they fell a bit in 2019 and then more in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Experts have wondered if that may have been related to a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters in which people come together and support each other.
The new report said suicide contributed to the decline in life expectancy in 2021, but did not provide details. According to provisional figures from a public CDC database, the number of suicides in the US rose last year by about 2,000 to 48,000. The US suicide rate also increased, from 13.5 per 100,000 to 14.1, bringing it back to where it was in 2018.
