U.S. sees 'historic' drop in life expectancy, driven by pandemic, drug overdoses, liver diseases

Life expectancy in the United States plummeted over the past several years, federal health authorities said this week, a grim reminder of the toll wrought by both the COVID-19 pandemic and a host of health maladies and illnesses that have come along with it. 

A Vital Statistics Rapid Release fact sheet published by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that "in 2021, life expectancy at birth was 76.1," a decline from roughly 79 years in 2019. 

The year-over-year drop was slightly more pronounced in men then women, with the former seeing an expectancy decline of fully one from 2020 year and the latter recording a decline of eight-tenths of a year.

The NCHS said fully half of the decline in expectancy could be attributed to COVID-19, while "unintentional injury," "heart disease, "liver disease and cirrhosis" and "suicides" formed sizable portions of the rest. 

The fact sheet said life expectancy in 2021 was "the lowest it's been since 1996." 

“Even small declines in life expectancy of a tenth or two-tenths of a year mean that on a population level, a lot more people are dying prematurely than they really should be,” Robert Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at the N.C.H.S., told the New York Times.