Life expectancy in U.S. declines for second consecutive year
Life expectancy in the United States dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
According to the report, released on Wednesday, the estimated life span of someone born in the U.S. plummeted by nearly three years since 2019, with the COVID-19 pandemic as the primary cause of the decline.
Life expectancy in 2021 dropped to 76.1 years, down from 77 years in 2020 and 78.8 in 2019.
The drop in life expectancy during the span of 2019 to 2021 – where it fell by 2.7 years – is the country’s worst two-year decline on record since 1923, according to the report.
“The declines in life expectancy since 2019 are largely driven by the pandemic,” the CDC said in a news release. “COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths, or 74%, of the decline from 2019 to 2020, and 50% of the decline from 2020 to 2021.”
To date, COVID-19 has caused the deaths of more than 1 million Americans and 46,596 Pennsylvanians.
The second-leading cause in the decline in life expectancy is the number of people who died from “unintentional injuries,” including drug overdose deaths, which accounted for about half of the unintentional injury deaths, according to the analysis.
Heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and suicide also contributed to the life expectancy decline.
Declines in life expectancy during the pandemic were worse for some racial and ethnic groups.
American Indian and Alaskan Native people experienced the greatest decline in life expectancy between 2020 and 2021, falling by almost two years, from 67.1 in 2020 to 65.2 in 2021.
Life expectancy in 2021 was 70.8 years for Black Americans and 76.4 years for white Americans.
According to the report, the difference in life expectancy between U.S. men and women widened from 5.7 to 5.9 years in 2021.
The life expectancy of a male in the U.S. dropped from 76.3 years in 2019 to 73.2 in 2021. For females, life expectancy fell from 81.4 years in 2019 to 79.1 in 2021.
More detailed reports for 2021 are expected from NCHS in coming months.
For example, the CDC last week released final estimates broken down by state for 2020, which saw life expectancy in the first year of the pandemic drop in every state and the District of Columbia.
The life expectancy of a Pennsylvanian in 2020 fell to 76.8 years.
In that report, Pennsylvania ranked 25th among the 50 states and Washington, D.C., for highest life expectancy.
Pennsylvania men rank 26th, with a life expectancy of 74 years, while women are 25th, at 79.6 years.
In New York, life expectancy fell by three years in 2020.
In seven other states – Louisiana, New Jersey, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, Illinois and Texas – and the District of Columbia, life expectancy fell by more than two years.
Several states saw life expectancy decrease by less than a year in 2020, including Hawaii, which dropped by two months. Other states in that group were New Hampshire (four months), Maine (five months), and Washington and Oregon (both eight months).
Western and Northeastern states – among them Hawaii (80.7 years), Washington (79.2 years), Minnesota (79.1 years), and California, Massachusetts and New Hampshire (79 years) – had the highest life expectancy.
The states with the lowest life expectancy in 2020 generally were from the South, including Mississippi (71.9 years), West Virginia (72.8 years), Louisiana (73.1 years), Alabama (73.2 years) and Kentucky (73.5 years).