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NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. life expectancy dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, falling by nearly a year from 2020, according to a government report being released Wednesday.
In the first
two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated American lifespan has
shortened by nearly three years. The last comparable decrease happened in the
early 1940s, during the height of World War II.
Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention officials blamed COVID-19 for about half the
decline in 2021, a year when vaccinations became widely available but new
coronavirus variants caused waves of hospitalizations and deaths. Other
contributors to the decline are longstanding problems: drug overdoses, heart
disease, suicide and chronic liver disease.
“It’s a
dismal situation. It was bad before and it’s gotten worse,” said Samuel
Preston, a University of Pennsylvania demographer.
Life
expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given
year might expect to live, given death rates at that time. It is “the most
fundamental indicator of population health in this country,” said Robert
Hummer, a University of North Carolina researcher focused on population health
patterns.
It was 78
years, 10 months in 2019. In 2020, it dropped to 77 years. Last year, it fell
to about 76 years, 1 month.
The last
time it was that low was in 1996.
Declines
during the pandemic were worse for some racial groups, and some gaps widened.
For example, life expectancy for American Indian and Alaskan Native people saw
a decline of more than 6 1/2 years since the pandemic began, and is at 65
years. In the same span, life expectancy for Asian Americans dropped by about
two years, and stands at 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 greater share of the
population in lower-paying jobs that required them to keep working when the
pandemic was at its worst.
The new
report is based on provisional data. Life expectancy estimates can change with
the addition of more data and further analysis. For example, the CDC initially
said life expectancy in 2020 declined by about 1 year 6 months. But after more
death reports and analysis came in, it ended up being about 1 year 10 months.
But it’s
likely the declines in 2020 and 2021 will stand as the first two consecutive
years of declining life expectancy in the U.S. since the early 1960s, CDC
officials said.
Findings in
the report:
—Life
expectancy for women in the United States dropped about 10 months, from just
under 80 years in 2020 to slightly more than 79 in 2021. Life expectancy for
men dropped a full year, from about 74 years to 73.
—COVID-19
deaths were the main reason for the decline. The second largest contributor was
deaths from accidental injuries — primarily from drug overdoses, which killed a
record-breaking 107,000 Americans last year.
—White
people saw the second biggest drop among racial and ethnic groups, with life
expectancy falling one year, to about 76 years, 5 months. Black Americans had
the third largest decline, falling more than eight months, to 70 years, 10
months
—Hispanic
Americans had seen a huge drop in life expectancy in 2020 — four years. But in
2021, life expectancy for them dropped by about two months, to about 77 years,
7 months. Preston thinks good vaccination rates among Hispanics played a role.
The report
also suggests gains against suicide are being undone.
U.S.
suicides rose from the early 2000s until 2018. But they fell a little in 2019
and then more in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Experts had wondered if
that may have been related to a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and
national disasters in which people band together and support each other.
The new
report said suicide contributed to the decline in life expectancy in 2021, but
it did not provide detail. According to provisional numbers from a public CDC
database, the number of U.S. suicides increased last year by about 2,000, to
48,000. The U.S. suicide rate rose as well, from 13.5 per 100,000 to 14.1 —
bringing it back up to about where it was in 2018.
The
Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is
solely responsible for all content.