American Life Expectancy Is Now at Its Lowest in Decades as COVID, Drug Overdose Deaths Rise
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Americans born in 2021 may live to an average age of 76.4, which is the shortest life expectancy in nearly three decades, according to two new studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday.
Just last year, life expectancy plunged by seven months, and in 2020, it faced a steep decline of 1.8 years, NPR reported.
The decline in 2020 was the largest since World War II, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to The Washington Post, American women could expect to live 79.3 years and men could expect to live to 73.5 if they were born in 2021.
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It's a figure last seen in 1996, The Washington Post reported, calling it a "dismal benchmark for a reliable measure of health that should rise steadily in an affluent, developed nation."
Deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, specifically synthetic opioids like fentanyl, are behind the big drops, NPR reported.
COVID is now the third leading cause of death, The Wall Street Journal reported, behind heart disease and cancer.
Seeing a significant change from year-to-year is unusual, NPR noted, citing research that 417,000 lost their lives to COVID in 2021, which is even more than the year in which the disease became a pandemic.
CDC statistician Kenneth Kochanek and his colleagues said COVID-19 accounted for a 60 percent decline in life expectancy, even though vaccines were distributed, according to NPR. (Preliminary data suggested COVID deaths declined in 2022.)
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Still, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and kidney disease were deadlier than usual in 2021, NPR reported.
The bright spots: Deaths from Alzheimer's, flu and pneumonia decreased, NPR said, and death rates for Hispanic and Black men were down.
In the second study released Thursday, it was reported that about 107,000 people died from drug overdoses last year, NPR said. Additional increases were seen in suicides, and from liver disease, or cirrhosis, caused by alcohol, continuing a trend that started nearly a decade ago when "deaths of despair" caused by drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism increased, The Washington Post reported.
"The majority of those deaths are to younger people, and deaths to younger people affect the overall life expectancy more than deaths to the elderly," Kochanek said, according to NPR.
The findings continue an alarming trend stateside, The Washington Post reported, saying a child born in the United States in 2019 could expect to live to 78.5, according to the World Health Organization, while a Japanese child born that year had a life expectancy of 84.5, Belgians lived to 81.4 and Swedes lived to 82.4.
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Other nations controlled the pandemic better, and a study published in August in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that eight experienced significant life expectancy "bounce backs" in 2021, including Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and France, The Washington Post reported.
The United States joined 12 countries where life expectancy continued to drop, including Germany, Chile, Bulgaria, Greece and Estonia, The Washington Post said.
