A new report shows the pandemic and the overdose crisis helped push down the average life expectancy in the U.S. for a second year in a row.
of 1.8 years in 2020. As a result, the expected life span of someone born in the U.S. is now 76.4 years — the shortest it has been in nearly two decades.
Kochanek and his colleagues had hoped the release of new vaccines might make for a healthier 2021, and didn't anticipate deaths from COVID-19 would top the prior year. But they were wrong. In fact, COVID-19 accounted for about 60% of the decline in life expectancy. Meanwhile, deaths from Alzheimer's, flu and pneumonia declined, perhaps because the coronavirus hit the elderly population particularly hard.The new numbers also speak to the acute mental health crisis that's run parallel to the pandemic: Deaths from drug overdoses reached over 106,000 last year — another major factor reducing life expectancy, according to the second CDC analysis released on Thursday.
"The majority of those deaths are to younger people, and deaths to younger people affect the overall life expectancy more than deaths to the elderly," Kochanek says.
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