A new report a few days ago from the US National Center for Health Statistics shows that life expectancy dropped by 3 years to about 73 for US men and 2.3 years to about 79 years for US women between 2019 and 2021. These are the lowest figures since 1996 after years of steadily increasing life expectancy for new-born babies.
Over the same period, the gap in life expectancy between men and women in the USA, which had been closing, widened again from 4.8 years in 2010 (the smallest recorded) to 6 years in 2021.
Despite the desperate claims of Trump-supporting evangelical preachers, far right extremists and conspiracy loons that COVID-19 was variously a hoax, a mild infection no worse than flu and could easily be prevented or cured with readily available drugs, without the need for 'dangerous' vaccines, three-quarters of over-all life expectancy lost during this period was attributed to COVID-19 deaths, according to a CDC statement.
Possibly due to the measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 such as wearing face covering, social distancing and lockdowns, deaths from influenza and other, non-COVID respiratory infections fell during the period, helping to offset some of the declining life expectancy.
There were also significant racial/ethnic and gender difference in the fall in life expectancy. According to the CDC report:
The report shows non-Hispanic American Indian-Alaskan Native people (AIAN) had the biggest drop in life expectancy in 2021 – 1.9 years. AIAN people had a life expectancy at birth of 65.2 years in 2021 – equal to the life expectancy of the total U.S. population in 1944. AIAN life expectancy has declined 6.6 years from 2019 to 2021.This can be chalked up as another success for the Repugnican Party as it tries to cover for the then president, Donald Trump's incompetence in handling the pandemic by continuing his panicky response of trying to minimise the seriousness of the situation. He adopted this response when he found he was out of his depth with the science and had no idea what to do about it, but, because of his narcissistic personality disorder, lacked the integrity to admit it and take the advice of people who knew better than he did. The Repugnican Party has thus become one of the first recorded political parties to actively pursue policies which are having an adverse effect on the population and a disproportionately detrimental effect on their own supporters, in what has been likened to a self-genocide of the gullible, Trumpanzee right.
Non-Hispanic white people in the United States had the second biggest decline in life expectancy in 2021 – one full year from 77.4 in 2020 to 76.4 in 2021. Non-Hispanic Black people had the third biggest decline, a 0.7 year drop from 71.5 years in 2020 to 70.8 in 2021. Life expectancy at birth in 2021 was the lowest for both groups since 1995. After a large (4.0 year) drop in life expectancy from 2019 to 2020, Hispanic people in the U.S. had a slight decline in 2021 of 0.2 years to 77.6 years. Life expectancy for non-Hispanic Asian people also dropped slightly in 2021 – 0.1 years – to 83.5 years, the highest life expectancy of any race/ethnic group included in this analysis.
Other findings documented in the report:
- Life expectancy at birth for women in the United States dropped 0.8 years from 79.9 years in 2020 to 79.1 in 2021, while life expectancy for men dropped one full year, from 74.2 years in 2020 to 73.2 in 2021. The report shows the disparity in life expectancy between men and women grew in 2021 from 5.7 years in 2020 to 5.9 years in 2021. From 2000 to 2010, this disparity had narrowed to 4.8 years, but gradually increased from 2010 to 2019 and is now the largest gap since 1996.
- The declines in life expectancy since 2019 are largely driven by the pandemic. COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths or 74% of the decline from 2019 to 2020 and 50% of the decline from 2020 to 2021. An estimated 16% of the decline in life expectancy from 2020 to 2021 can be attributed to increases in deaths from accidents/unintentional injuries. Drug overdose deaths account for nearly half of all unintentional injury deaths. The most recent data reported by NCHS showed more than 109,000 overdose deaths in the one-year period ending in March of 2022.
- Other causes of death contributing to the decline in life expectancy from 2020 to 2021 include heart disease (4.1% of the decline), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3.0%), and suicide (2.1%). For men, the one-year decline in life expectancy was attributed primarily to mortality from COVID-19 (49.5% of the decline), unintentional injuries (19.1%), suicide (3.6%), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3.4%), and homicide (2.5%). For women, the 0.8 year decline in life expectancy was attributed mainly to mortality from COVID-19 (51.2% of the decline), unintentional injuries (14.8%), heart disease (5.7%), stroke (3.5%), and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (2.4%).
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