The average life expectancy of Americans has fallen by nearly three years since 2019, according to a report by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
The data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that in 2021, the average life expectancy age was 76, down from 79 in 2019. The NCHS statistics found it was the steepest drop in almost 100 years.
Health officials report the three-year decline in the average life expectancy in 2020 and 2021 was the result, largely early on, of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Robert Anderson, NCHS mortality statistics chief.
“By the time we got to the end of 2020, life expectancy had dropped almost two years — it was 1.8 years,” he said. “Certainly, there was some state variation in the change in life expectancy, but overall, we saw declines for every state from 2019 to 2020.”
NCHS officials said the data for 2021 is provisional, and a final report would be released in December.
The findings by NCHS show that the decline in life expectancy significantly shortened in the communities for Native Americans and Alaskan natives, dropping by four years in 2020 and bringing the age to 65 for those groups. From 2019 to 2021, the Native American life expectancy declined by 6.6 years.
“That’s just astounding,” Anderson said.
In an article published by The New York Times, Dr. Ann Bullock, former director of diabetes treatment and prevention at the federal Indian Health Service agency, noted that issues such as poverty and poor access to health care, and a high rate of diabetes among those communities were among the reasons Native Americans and Alaska Natives struggled more with COVID-19.
“There is no doubt Covid was a contributor to the increase in mortality during the last couple of years, but it didn’t start these problems — it made everything that much worse,” Dr. Bullock said in the article.
From 2019 to 2021, Anderson said there was a four-year decline in life expectancy for the black American population, a 2.4-year decline for the white American population, and a 4.2-year drop for the Hispanic American population.
The data shows that from 2019 to 2020, the life expectancy for black Americans fell to 71.5 and dropped to 77.4 for white Americans. The life expectancy for Hispanic Americans fell to 77.9, down from 81.9 in 2019.
From 2020 to 2021, the average life expectancy for black Americans declined by seven-tenths of a year, and for white Americans, it dropped by another year, from 77.4 years of age in 2020 to 76.4 in 2021. In that same timeframe, the life expectancy rate for Hispanic Americans declined two-tenths of a year.
“The declines were much smaller during 2021,” Anderson noted.
In terms of gender, Anderson said that while men typically have a lower life expectancy than women, the pandemic widened the gap, as COVID-19 resulted in more deaths among men than women.
“It’s not surprising that we would see a slightly larger disparity between males and females during the pandemic,” he said.
Aside from the coronavirus, Anderson said there were other leading causes of death that contributed to the change in life expectancy, including unintentional injuries such as vehicle accidents, falls, and, most notably, drug overdoses, which impacted the rates second only to COVID-19.
“We were seeing sort of a flattening and even slightly declining drug overdose death rates just prior to the pandemic and a quite steep increase in drug overdose mortality during the pandemic,” he said.
However, Anderson noted, it is difficult to tie drug overdoses to the pandemic as mortality rate increases began in later 2019. He said by the time the pandemic was in full force, drug overdose mortality had sharply increased.
Statistics from the report show that aside from COVID-19, unintentional injuries accounted for 15.9% of the negative contribution to life expectancy between 2020-2021. Heart disease (4.1%), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis of the liver (3%), and suicide (2.1%), also contributed to lowered life expectancy, according to the data.
“The decline in life expectancy would have been even greater were it not for the offsetting effects of decreases in mortality due to influenza and pneumonia (38.5%), chronic lower respiratory diseases (28.8%), Alzheimer’s disease (18.3%), perinatal conditions (6.3%), and Parkinson disease (2.3%),” the report said.