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US life expectancy continued its alarming steady decline in 2021 as covid-19 and lawlessness Drugs killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, according to final government figures released Thursday.
Even as some peer nations began to recover from the pandemic’s toll, life expectancy in the United States fell to 76.4 years at birth, from 77 in 2020, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That means Americans can expect to live as long as they did in 1996—a dismal benchmark for a reliable measure of health that should be rising steadily in a developed, wealthy country. (In August, using preliminary data, the agency had pegged life expectancy in 2021 at 76.1 years.)
In particular, all age groups in the US, from young children to the elderly 85 and over saw an increase in their death rate. Men, women, and most racial groups lost ground. In some previous years, even as overall life expectancy declined, some groups made progress.
“This one is kind of bad news across the board,” said Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California who studies life expectancy around the world. “We have been going since 1996 without improving. That’s incredible, considering how much we’ve learned about medicine, how much we’ve spent.”
The government reported last week that health spending in 2021 reached $13,000 per person.
The data reinforce a trend line in American longevity that is declining relative to that of its peers. A child born in the United States in 2019, for example, could expect to live to 78.5, according to the World Health Organization, while a Japanese child born that year had a life expectancy of 84.5, the Belgian they lived to 81.4 and the Swedes to 82.4. .
In total, 3.46 million people died in the United States in 2021, 80,502 more than the previous year. Covid killed 416,893, and drug overdoses were responsible for 106,699 deaths, slightly less than the more than 107,000 the government had cited in preliminary figures. At birth, women could expect to live 79.3 years in 2021, and men could expect to live to 73.5, a life expectancy that declined sharply from 2020.
In 2021, heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in the United States, saw little change. The top ten causes of death remained the same, except for flu and pneumonia, which fell off the list as parts of the US population wore masks to protect themselves from the coronavirus. Liver disease, often related to alcohol consumption and viruses, replaced influenza and pneumonia.
The 2021 decline was the second consecutive decline in the United States and the continuation of a trend that began in the middle of the last decade, when “deaths from despair” – those caused by drug overdoses, suicide and alcoholism – they increased significantly.
It also contrasted with rising life expectancy rates in some other nations as they eased the covid pandemic. greater control with vaccines and masks. A study of 29 countries published in August in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that eight experienced a significant “bounce” in life expectancy by 2021.
They include Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, France and other mainly Western countries, the United States was among 12 where life expectancy continued to decline. They include Germany, Chile, Bulgaria, Greece and Estonia, among others.
“With the vaccine available and other pandemic control measures, many other countries recovered,” said Steven Woolf, professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. “The fact that it has happened in other countries tells us that it is possible to do it.”
But few other countries faced hundreds of thousands of deaths from covid, along with a relentless drug overdose epidemic caused largely by illicit drugs. synthetic opioid fentanyl. Drug overdoses rose 14 percent last year and have increased fivefold in two decades. These overdoses claimed more lives last year in all age groups 25 and older, and in all groups except Asian men.
Fentanyl did about two-thirds of the damage. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported Tuesday that it had seized 379 million doses of fentanyl by 2022, enough “to kill everyone in the United States,” according to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram. Still, authorities estimate they are capturing only 5 to 10 percent of the illegal fentanyl that crosses the southern border.
Deaths from methamphetamine and cocaine also rose sharply last year. Experts have speculated that fentanyl may be involved in some of these fatalities because it is tied to the entire drug supply, causing some users to ingest it unknowingly.
Magdalena Cerda, a professor in the Department of Population Health at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said people who think they are using cocaine or methamphetamine may not be taking precautions. such as having naloxone, an antidote for opioid overdoses, or fentanyl test strips on hand.
“People think they only do cocaine or only methamphetamines, but they also do fentanyl,” he said.
Many people who die of overdose have multiple drugs in their systems.
“This is certainly heartbreaking,” said R. Kathryn McHugh, chief of psychology at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. “There are 106,000 people with families who are no longer here.”
The data show that fentanyl appears to replace heroin, a much less potent opioid. Deaths from the drug fell 32 percent from the previous year, the government reported.
As years ago, experts cited the anomalies of life in the United States as they tried to explain the nation’s declining life expectancy. These include the lack of universal health care, the huge death toll from gun violence, the widening income gap between the rich and the poor, the consumption of unhealthy foods, poor government support for housing and childcare and many other social and economic factors.
“My contention is that there are choices that we make as a society and that policymakers make in the United States that other countries are not making,” said Woolf, the VCU professor.
McHugh and Cerda called for stepping up treatment efforts to combat the worsening drug epidemic by increasing access to medications such as buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone. They also said the U.S. needs to expand the use of harm reduction techniques by expanding the distribution of naloxone, syringe services and fentanyl test strips.
“A lot of the tools we need we already have,” McHugh said. “We just have to deploy them better.”