US Life Expectancy Falls for Second Year in a Row

More than 20 years of gradual increases in American life expectancy have been wiped out by the twin plagues of COVID-19 and opioid overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency has released its final estimates for 2021, and "it's not a good year for the data, put it that way," CDC statistician Kenneth Kochanek tells NPR. Average life expectancy fell by more than six months last year, with a drop of 0.7 years following a drop of 1.8 years in 2020, the largest since World War II. The CDC says people born in 2021 could expect to live 76.4 years on average, 79.3 years for women and 73.5 years for men, the lowest since 1996. US life expectancy peaked at almost 79 years in 2019, researchers say.

Deaths from COVID-19 and opioid overdoses, especially fentanyl, were the main causes of the drop in life expectancy. Deaths from liver disease and suicide also rose. "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 says. Deaths from causes including flu, pneumonia, and Alzheimer's disease were down in 2021, possibly because so many elderly people died in the pandemic. The CDC's latest figures, which are little changed from estimates released earlier this year, found that death rates rose in every age group, CBS reports. As in 2020, the three leading causes of death were heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19.

The fourth leading cause of death was "accidental injuries," which includes drug overdoses, the AP reports. The CDC said almost 107,000 Americans died from overdoses in 2021, up 16% from almost 92,000 overdose deaths in 2020, though the latest figures show that the death rate finally started slowing down in 2022. A Kaiser Family Foundation report released earlier this month found that while life expectancy in comparable countries also dropped in 2020, it rebounded in other countries last year while continuing to drop in the US, leaving a gap of more than six years between life expectancy in the US and the average in other relatively wealthy nations. (More life expectancy stories.)