Life expectancy in the United States is increasing almost as fast as it was declining at the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19.
Between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy fell by 2.4 years, and in 2022 it increased by more than a year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2023, life expectancy has risen by almost another full year.
The improvement is significant due to lower death rates for each of the 10 leading causes of death.
The death rate for Covid-19, about 12 cases for every 100,000 people in 2023, has fallen to about a quarter of that in 2022, bringing it from the fourth leading cause of death to the tenth.
"One of the main reasons we saw such a big drop in life expectancy was the huge number of deaths caused by Covid. So once we started to reduce deaths from Covid-19 through vaccination, it was expected that life expectancy would start to rise again," says Dr. Stephen Wolf, director emeritus of the Center for Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Drug overdose deaths also fell by 4 percent between 2022 and 2023, the data show. | BGNES
