The New American by
The life expectancy of Americans fell by almost a year in 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The COVID pandemic, “unintentional injuries” (drug overdoses and suicides), heart disease, and chronic liver disease are noted as the main negative contributing factors, the agency observed in its provisional analysis posted on Wednesday.
Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which issued the report, signaled that there were “other causes of death as well,” which were “probably related to the pandemic, but not directly to the virus.”
From the report:
The decline of 0.9 year in life expectancy between 2020 and 2021 was primarily due to increases in mortality due to COVID-19 (50.0% of the negative contribution), unintentional injuries (15.9%), heart disease (4.1%), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3.0%), and suicide (2.1%)
Life expectancy has dropped for Americans of all races, albeit at a different rate. Among whites, the decline in 2021 was one year — from 77.4 in 2020 to 76.4. Among blacks, the drop was 0.7 years, from 71.5 to 70.8. Hispanics experienced a smaller decline, from 77.9 to 77.7 years. Among Asians, life expectancy also dropped by much less than a year, from 83.6 to 83.5 years.
