US life expectancy further declines, largely due to COVID-19
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Key takeaways
- Life expectancy has dropped by nearly a year from 2020 to 2021 in the United States.
- Overall life expectancy was 76.1 years in 2021. Women were expected to live about 6 years longer than men.
- The life expectancy for non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaskan Native people dropped to 65.2 years, which is the same life expectancy for the U.S. population during World War II.
Life expectancy in the United States has declined for the second consecutive year, reaching levels that have not been seen since 1996, according to provisional data from the CDC.
Elizabeth Arias, PhD, a member of the statistical analysis and research team at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, and colleagues found that, between 2020 and 2021, life expectancy at birth dropped by nearly a year, continuing a trend from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the pandemic’s beginning, life expectancy in the U.S. has fallen by more than 2.5 years. The CDC previously estimated that life expectancy decreased from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.3 years in 2020, representing the largest 1-year life expectancy decline since World War II.
For 2021, the researchers wrote the overall life expectancy was 76.1 years — 73.2 years for men and 79.1 years for women.
COVID-19, which the CDC wrote was responsible for 460,000 deaths in 2021, “was the leading cause contributing negatively to the change in life expectancy for the total population.”
Broken down by race, the researchers highlighted some discrepancies.
Since 2019, life expectancy for American Indian and Alaskan Native people has dropped 6.6 years. This year, those communities faced the largest life expectancy decline. Between 2020 and 2021, life expectancy dropped significantly for Indigenous peoples, from 67.1 to 65.2 years — “the same life expectancy of the total U.S. population in 1944.”
In 2020, Hispanic and Black Americans saw a decline in life expectancy, respectively, but in 2021, white Americans faced the larger decline. They saw a 1-year decline, with life expectancy reaching 76.4 years. Black Americans saw a decline of just under 1 year, with a life expectancy of 70.8 years, and Hispanic Americans saw a 0.2-year decline, with a life expectancy of 77.7 years. Asian Americans saw the smallest drop, with a decline from 83.6 to 83.5 years.
COVID-19 deaths contributed substantially to life expectancy declines: 54.1% for white people, 35% for Black people and 21.4% for American Indian and Alaskan Native peoples.
For Hispanic people, COVID-19 was the second leading cause that contributed to the life expectancy decline at 25.5%, and unintentional injuries — “largely driven by drug overdose deaths, according to the researchers — were the leading cause, at 31.2%. Unintentional injuries were also the second leading cause for Black, American Indian and Alaskan Native, and white populations, at 22.7%, 21.3% and 11.8%, respectively.
Suicides also contributed to the shortened life expectancy. Though deaths by suicide declined in 2020, they were still the fifth-largest contributor to the life expectancy decline and the third-largest contributor for the shortened life expectancy in men, according to Arias and colleagues.
Perspective
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A recent press release by the National Center for Health Statistics on life expectancy indicated that the life expectancy at birth in 2021 for the U.S. population declined by almost a year when compared with 2020. However, this is not unexpected, as the decline in life expectancy was majorly due to a rise in mortalities from COVID-19 infections. At the same time, it was interesting to note that there was a decline in mortalities due to influenza and pneumonia, and chronic lower respiratory tract infections in 2021.
The non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaskan Native people saw the largest decline in life expectancies of 1.9 years, from 67.1 years in 2020 to 65.2 years in 2021. The non-Hispanic whites saw the second-most decline in life expectancy of 1 year between 2020 and 2021. However, Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black people saw a smaller decline in life expectancies in 2021 than in 2020. Nonetheless, this decline in life expectancy for 2 consecutive years is disturbing and concerning. It is just another indicator of how devastating COVID-19 infections can be and a great reminder to take our vaccinations and booster series, if not already done.
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Vital Statistics Rapid Release. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf. Published Aug. 31, 2022. Accessed Aug. 31, 2022.
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