[Life Expectancy in the US Rises After Pandemic
Life expectancy in the United States is rising nearly as quickly as it fell at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic as deaths from Covid-19 and drug overdoses drop. After falling 2.4 years between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy rose by more than a year in 2022, and new data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that it increased by nearly another full year in 2023.
People born in 2023 are now estimated to live 78.4 years, according to the CDC. That’s still shy of the 78.8-year life expectancy from 2019, but it’s a significant improvement driven by lower death rates in each of the 10 leading causes of death. The death rate for Covid-19 dropped to about a quarter of what it was in 2022, bringing it from the fourth leading cause of death to the 10th.
Drug overdose deaths also dropped 4% between 2022 and 2023, CDC data shows. The drop — from 32.6 deaths for every 100,000 people in 2022 to 31.3 in 2023 — marks the first decrease in more than five years. People ages 35 to 44 are most likely to die from a drug overdose, with rates nearly double the overall age-adjusted rate.
Reducing mortality in causes that particularly affect younger age groups such as this can have an outsized effect on life expectancy, according to Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Society and Health. “Getting some significant reduction in drug overdose deaths can have a very positive effect on our health trends,” he said.
The death rate from heart disease, the most common cause of death in the US, dropped 3% between 2022 and 2023. Death rates from diabetes, kidney disease and chronic liver disease decreased more than 5%, while decreases for cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases and Alzheimer’s disease were smaller.
However, Woolf warns that bringing US life expectancy back to pre-pandemic levels shouldn’t be the goal. His research shows that the country has been falling behind on life expectancy for decades and that it’s rebounding slower than many other countries. Other research suggests that US life expectancy may stall by 2050.
The US still lags behind other high-income countries in life expectancy, with American men and women dying at higher rates than their peers in other countries. Women can still expect to live more than five years longer than men, but the gap has been closing.
Death rates decreased for all racial and ethnic groups that were analyzed for 2023, but age-adjusted rates were still highest by far for American Indian men and Black men. Death rates were also higher than average for American Indian women, White men and Black women.
After a notable increase in infant mortality in 2022, rates stayed flat in 2023, the new CDC data shows. However, rates of congenital malformations and low birth weights — the two leading causes of infant death in the US — both ticked up. Mortality among children and adolescents has been increasing in recent years, Woolf said, and death rates among the youngest in the US are well higher than they are in other peer nations.
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