Scientists from Virginia Commonwealth University found that life expectancy in the United States dropped in 2021.
This continues a troubling trend that began in the first year of the pandemic.
They found the average U.S. life expectancy tumbled from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 in 2020. It then fell by a smaller amount in 2021, to 76.60 years.
The research was posted on MedRxiv and was conducted by Dr. Steven Woolf et al.
Scientists already knew that the U.S. experienced historic losses in life expectancy in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What wasn’t clear is what happened in 2021.
In the study, the team used official data for 2018 to 2020, and then provisional data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics for 2021.
They used modeling to analyze the changes in life expectancy.
They found the emergence of the faster-spreading Delta and Omicron COVID-19 variants played a big role in the decrease of life expectancy.
Deaths from these variants occurred almost entirely among unvaccinated people.
They believe that what happened in the U.S. is less about the variants than the levels of resistance to vaccination and the public’s rejection of practices, such as masking and mandates, to reduce viral transmission.
They added that high rates of obesity and heart disease, along with inequities in access to health care, only made matters worse once the pandemic began.
Those same factors made the U.S. more vulnerable than other countries to the mortality consequences of COVID-19.
Not only did longevity drop further in the United States, but America fared worse than 19 other wealthy countries during the pandemic.
The life expectancy decline for communities of color was huge in 2020 by all historical standards, but that did not continue in 2021.
Hispanic Americans maintained life expectancy between the two most recent years, after dropping 3.7 years in 2020.
Black Americans rebounded 0.42 years in 2021, compared to their decline of 3.22 years in 2020. No estimates are available for Asian Americans, Native Americans or other demographics because of data limitations.
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