According to a government data released on Wednesday, the US life expectancy decreased for the second year in a row in 2021, falling by roughly a year from 2020.
As per The Guardian, in the first two years of the Covid-19 epidemic, the predicted life expectancy in the United States decreased by roughly three years. The previous comparable decline occurred during the height of World War II, in the early 1940s.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) blamed Covid for approximately half of the reduction in 2021, a year in which immunizations became widely available, but novel coronavirus strains produced waves of hospitalizations and fatalities. Other factors contributing to the decline include persistent difficulties such as drug overdoses, cardiovascular disease, suicide, and chronic liver disease.
“The situation is awful. “It was bad before, and it’s become worse,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer from the University of Pennsylvania. Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a particular year can expect to live, given the prevailing mortality rate. It is “the most fundamental indicator of population health in this country,” according to Robert Hummer, an expert on population health patterns at the University of North Carolina.
Life expectancy in the United States climbed for decades, but improvement halted before to the epidemic. 2019 marked 78 years and 10 months of age. In 2020, it fell to 77 years old. Last year, it decreased to approximately 76 years and 1 month. 1996 was the last time it was that low.
Some racial groups experienced more severe declines during the epidemic, and some gaps worsened. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the life expectancy of American Indians and Alaska Natives has decreased by more than six and a half years to 65 years. In the same time period, the life expectancy of Asian Americans decreased by approximately two years to 83 and a half.
Lack of access to quality healthcare, lower vaccination rates, and a bigger proportion of the population in lower-paying occupations that necessitated them to continue working during the height of the epidemic are all probable explanations, according to experts.
The new report utilizes preliminary data. Estimates of life expectancy can fluctuate with the inclusion of further data and analysis. Initially, the CDC estimated that life expectancy in 2020 would decrease by around one year and six months. However, once additional death reports and analyses were compiled, the duration was determined to be around one year and ten months.
CDC officials predict that the losses in 2020 and 2021 will mark the first two consecutive years of decreased life expectancy in the United States since the early 1960s.
