Newly published data on life expectancy in the United States shows a partial rebound from the worst phase of the coronavirus pandemic, but drug overdoses, homicides and chronic illnesses such as heart disease continue to drive a long-term mortality crisis that has made this country an outlier in longevity among wealthy nations.
Life expectancy in 2022 rose more than a full year, to 77.5 years, in data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than four-fifths of this positive jump was attributable to a drop in covid-19 deaths.
But the rebound in 2022, which the CDC had anticipated after studying death rates, regained less than half the years lost to the pandemic, the federal health agency reported.
“The amount of recovery is not as much as we’d like to see,” Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said after reviewing the report.
He said many peer countries suffered smaller drops in life expectancy and rebounded more quickly from covid-19’s impact.
“It’s disturbing but not surprising to me that we have not experienced the recovery that other countries have,” Woolf said.
In 2019, U.S. life expectancy at birth stood at 78.8 years. That figure cratered to 76.4 in 2021, the lowest since 1996. That was due partly to the extraordinary wave of covid deaths in January and February of that year as the United Stateshad only begun to roll out vaccines. The following winter saw another short but intense wave of deaths as the omicron variant of the virus reached the country, creating the last major surge in pandemic deaths.
“There appears to have been some recovery from covid, but we still have a way to go,” said William Schaffner, an infectious-disease physician at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.