NBC News is reporting that for the second year in a row the life expectancy in the United States has dropped.
In 2020, Covid got a lot of the blame for shorter lifespans, although lockdowns contributed to that number as much as the disease itself.
In 2021, however, mortality continued to drop despite less and less Covid deaths.
In the first two years of the Covid pandemic, the estimated American lifespan has shortened by nearly three years. The last comparable decrease happened in the early 1940s, during the height of World War II.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials blamed Covid for about half the decline in 2021, a year when vaccinations became widely available but new coronavirus variants caused waves of hospitalizations and deaths. Other contributors to the decline are long-standing problems: drug overdoses, heart disease, suicide and chronic liver disease.
Sure, Covid is still an issue, mostly for the very old and the immunocompromised.
But drug deaths, with fentanyl being the leading killer of men between 18-45, are a MAJOR culprit as well.
Once the lockdowns kicked in, drug and alcohol consumption went up along with generally unhealthy behavior and mental health decline.
"It's a dismal situation. It was bad before and it's become worse," said Samuel Preston, a University of Pennsylvania demographer.
Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might be expected to live, given death rates at that time. It is "the most fundamental indicator of population health in this country," said Robert Hummer, a University of North Carolina researcher focused on population health patterns.
U.S. life expectancy rose for decades, but progress stalled before the pandemic.
It was 78 years, 10 months in 2019. In 2020, it dropped to 77 years. Last year, it fell to about 76 years, 1 month.
The last time it was that low was in 1996.
Deaths of despair and drug overdoses are quite literally destroying a generation of people.
These numbers are tragic and disastrous.
Especially when you include the suicide factor.
The report also suggests gains against suicide are being undone.
U.S. suicides rose from the early 2000s until 2018. But they fell a little in 2019 and then more in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Experts had wondered if that may have been related to a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters in which people band together and support each other.
The new report said suicide contributed to the decline in life expectancy in 2021, but it did not provide detail. According to provisional numbers from a public CDC database, the number of U.S. suicides increased last year by about 2,000, to 48,000. The U.S. suicide rate rose as well, from 13.5 per 100,000 to 14.1 — bringing it back up to about where it was in 2018.
People in America committed suicide less in 2020 at the height of the Covid fear, than they did in Biden's first year of his presidency.
