With the country battered by Covid-19 and an ongoing drug overdose epidemic, average life expectancy in the United States fell to 76.4 years last year, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thursday.
The grim report marks the second year in a row that life expectancy at birth has fallen, dropping to a level not seen since 1996. In 2020, life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years, a shockingly large change for a single year. Last year, the decline moderated, with life expectancy falling by six-tenths of a year — a smaller but still unusually large change over a 12-month period.
The causes of death remained basically steady from 2020 to 2021, with heart disease, cancer and Covid-19 claiming the top three spots.
Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University, told USA Today that the data indicates that all of the gains from medical advances made over the last 25 years have been wiped out. It also confirms that the U.S. population is worse off in terms of health than other wealthy nations, the majority of which saw rebounds in life expectancy last year following pandemic-driven declines the year before.
"The fact that the United States in 2020 and 2021 did so much worse than other countries is a warning sign that this health disadvantage that America has had for many years is really getting pretty bad," he said. "We need to make a decision as to whether we're just going to accept those losses and accept that Americans are going to be less healthy than people (in other wealthy countries) and live much shorter lives or we need to do something about it," he added. "We don't lack solutions. We lack political will."
