The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and high levels of opioid overdose deaths reduced life expectancy in the United States for the second year in a row in 2021, with a child born that year expected to live 76.4 years, the lowest since 1996. according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
By comparison, Americans born in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit, can expect to live 78.8 years.
In 2019, the United States experienced 715.2 deaths per 100,000 people. By 2021, that number had risen by 23% to 897.7.
While most countries in the world experienced a decline in life expectancy during the pandemic, it was particularly pronounced in the United States and while many advanced economies, including France, Belgium, Switzerland and Sweden saw their life expectancy recover to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, death rates continued to USA to climb.
Heart disease, cancer and covid-19 remained the top three causes of death in 2021, unchanged from the previous year. In 2021, the United States also recorded 106,699 deaths attributed to drug overdoses, or more than 30 per 100,000 people.
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Since 2001, when the number was below 10 per 100,000, the number has increased every year.
Overdose deaths have an outsized effect on life expectancy because victims are disproportionately young.
Differences by gender, race
Women in the United States have, on average, a higher life expectancy than men. In 2021, a girl born in the United States could expect to live 79.3 years, while a boy could expect to live 73.5 years.
An American turning 65 in 2021 could expect to live an additional 18.4 years on average, while women could expect to live 19.7 years longer โ for men, the figure was unchanged from 2020 โ at 17 years.
Dividing the population by gender, race and Hispanic origin highlights large differences in death rates. Among men, American Indian and Alaska Native men had the highest rate of deaths per 100,000 people in 2021, 1,717.5
The second highest death rate was for black males, at 1,380.2. White men experienced 1,055.3 deaths per 100,000, Hispanic men experienced 915.6, and Asian men only 578.1.
Among women, the death rate was highest for American Indian and Alaska Native women, 1,236.6 per 100,000, followed by black women at 921.9. White women experienced 750.6 deaths per 100,000, followed by Hispanic women at 599.8. Asian women had the lowest death rate of any subgroup, at 391.1 per 100,000.
International comparison
Compared to other rich industrialized countries, especially in Europe, life expectancy in the United States is not only lower, it is getting worse.
A study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior in October mapped the stark differences between the United States and many European nations. While almost all countries in Europe experienced a sharp decline in life expectancy in 2020, the first full year of the pandemic, many had returned to 2019 levels the following year.
Among them, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and France all saw life expectancy recover to near pre-pandemic levels in 2021. Other countries, including the UK, Portugal, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia and Iceland had all recovered somewhat, but not the entire lost life expectancy.
Alone among rich European countries to report two back-to-back declines was Germany, although its combined decline in life expectancy, less than a year in total, was much smaller than in the US
Other European countries, mostly former Soviet states, also saw consecutive annual declines, including Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland, although none of these saw as sharp a decline as the US
The only European countries with a steeper decline in life expectancy than the United States from 2019 to 2021 were Bulgaria and Slovakia.
The differences in life expectancy between the US and other rich countries are even more pronounced compared to industrialized countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Data collected by the World Bank shows that a child born in rich countries in that region, including Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, had a life expectancy of 82 years or more in 2020.
Public health failure
Declining life expectancy in the United States, especially when it comes to deaths related to Covid-19, is particularly frustrating to experts, who note the widespread availability of vaccines and the fact that health care workers have far more knowledge about how to fight the disease than they did in the clinic. the beginning of the pandemic.
“It’s absolutely a public health failure and a policy failure,” Noreen Goldman, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, told VOA.
“It is certainly partly due to the lack of public health infrastructure, the lack of any kind of national coordination of our strategies during the pandemic, high politicization of vaccination and higher [vaccine] refusal in the United States than in most other high-income countries,” she said.
Goldman said there are other complicating factors, not the least of which is the lack of universal health care that exists in all other wealthy nations. Other factors also play a role, including the high prevalence of other medical conditions, such as obesity and diabetes, that are associated with worse covid-19 outcomes.