According to a government report being issued on Wednesday, the U.S. life expectancy declined for the second year in a row in 2021, dropping by almost a year from 2020. According to estimates, the COVID-19 epidemic has reduced Americans’ average life expectancy by close to three years in the first two years. The most recent comparable decline took place at the height of World War II, in the early 1940s.
About half of the drop in 2021, a year when immunizations became widely accessible but new coronavirus variations produced waves of hospitalizations and fatalities, was attributed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials to COVID-19. Long-standing issues like drug overdoses, heart disease, suicide, and chronic liver disease are other factors in the decline.
This is a bad situation. It was terrible before, and it’s become worse, according to demographer Samuel Preston of the University of Pennsylvania. According to the death rates of the period, life expectancy is an estimate of the typical number of years a baby born in a certain year might expect to live. According to Robert Hummer, a researcher at the University of North Carolina who studies population health patterns, it is “the most basic indication of population health in this country.”
Some racial groups experienced worse epidemic declines than others, and some gaps grew wider. For instance, the average life expectancy of American Indian and Alaska Native people has decreased by more than 6 1/2 years since the epidemic started, and is now 65 years. Asian Americans now live to an average age of 83 1/2, a two-year decline in life expectancy during the same period.
