U.S. Life Expectancy Rose Significantly Last Year, Hitting Highest Level Since Pandemic; International Study Reveals COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact On Other Causes Of Death, and other C-Virus related stories

U.S. life expectancy rose significantly last year, hitting highest level since pandemic

U.S. life expectancy rose significantly last year, hitting highest level since pandemic

U.S. life expectancy rose last year, hitting its highest level since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, released Thursday, found that life expectancy at birth was 78.4 years in 2023. That’s a significant rise — nearly a full year — from the life expectancy of 77.5 years in 2022.

“The increase we had this year — the 0.9 year — that’s unheard of prior to the pandemic,” said Ken Kochanek, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics who co-authored the report.

“Life expectancy in the United States never goes up or down any more than one- or two-tenths,” he said. “But then when Covid happened, you had this gigantic drop, and now we have a gigantic drop in Covid. So, you have this gigantic increase in life expectancy.”

From 2019 to 2021, U.S. life expectancy dropped from 78.8 years to 76.4.

Covid deaths fell significantly last year: Whereas Covid was the fourth leading cause of death in 2022, it was the 10th in 2023, according to the new report. Last year, Covid was the underlying or contributing cause of more than 76,000 deaths, according to an August CDC report, compared with more than 350,000 such deaths in 2020.

The new findings are based on an analysis of death certificates from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The results showed that the overall death rate for the U.S. population decreased by 6%.

Kochanek noted, however, that the decrease in Covid deaths does not mean the virus’s threat is gone.

“It’s not going to disappear completely,” he said, adding that it’s not yet known whether deaths will continue to fall before leveling off at a more predictable annual rate.

According to the new report, the top five causes of death in the U.S. last year were heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases. Death rates fell for nine of the top 10 causes in 2023, while the rate of cancer deaths remained fairly unchanged. —>READ MORE HERE

International study reveals COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on other causes of death:

Researchers have analyzed cause-of-death data for 24 countries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found that life expectancy declined in 2020 for all but four of the 24 included countries, with the US experiencing the largest decline of 2.1 years for males. In 2021, most countries experienced further declines in life expectancy, with females in Bulgaria and males in Latvia experiencing the largest losses of over two years.

Lead author Antonino Polizzi, student at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, said, “This study explores the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality across the world and highlights that life expectancy losses had still not returned to pre-pandemic levels in several countries by 2022.”

The study found that, in addition to COVID-19 deaths, increased mortality attributed to cardiovascular disease was a major contributor to life expectancy losses during the first two years of the pandemic, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The paper, “Indirect Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cause-of-Death Analysis of Life Expectancy Changes in 24 Countries, 2015 to 2022,” is published in PNAS Nexus.

In 2020, cardiovascular disease-related losses were greatest in Russia, which experienced losses of 5.3 months. Bulgaria experienced cardiovascular disease-related losses of 5.5 months in 2021. The authors suggest that this could have been due to lapses in prevention or treatment of cardiovascular disease, or undercounted COVID-19 deaths.

Co-author Professor Jennifer Dowd, Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Oxford Population Health’s Demographic Science Unit, said, “The pandemic reversed years of progress in reducing cardiovascular deaths in several countries, which constituted one of the largest sources of gains in life expectancy over the period 2015–2019. These losses continued through 2022.” —>READ MORE HERE

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