United States: Americans are living longer as life expectancy increases nearly as fast as it decreased at the beginning of Covid as deaths from from Covid and drug overdoses have dropped significantly.
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Following a 2.4-year drop between the years 2019 and 2021, the life expectancy record moved up by more than one year in 2022, and fresh data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that it went up by nearly another complete year in 2023.
Those people born recently this year, 2023, are expected to live about 78.4 years, as postulated through the CDC.
That is below the life expectancy of 78.8 years in 2019, but it has improved as a result of reduced mortality in each of the ten main causes of mortality.
The mortality rate for COVID-19 – at a rate of roughly 12 deaths per 100,000 of the population in 2023 – was reduced by a factor of three percent, based on differing population ages for different groups – fell from being the fourth cause of death to the tenth cause of death of 2022.
As Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Society and Health, added, “One of the major reasons we saw such a big drop in life expectancy was the massive death toll from Covid. So once we started to get control of COVID-19 mortality through vaccination, it was expected that life expectancy would start climbing back up,” CNN Health reported.
Drug overdose deaths
Drug overdose deaths also reduce by 4% in 2023, this is according to the CDC’s data. The decline — 32.6 per 100,000 in 2022 and 31.3 in 2023 —is the first decline in over five years.
Adults aged 35 to 44 years are also at the greatest risk of dying because of a drug overdose; the rates are nearly double that of the overall age-adjusted rate.
Lowering mortality in causes that especially endanger young people, such as this, can make a big difference in life expectancy, Woolf pointed out.
Furthermore, “Drug overdose deaths have been a major player in life expectancy trends and all-cause mortality,” he added.
“Getting some significant reduction in drug overdose deaths can have a very positive effect on our health trends,” Woolf continued, reported CNN Health.
Trends in newer provisional data indicate that overdose deaths have remained, if anything, on an even sharper downward trajectory in recent months, and there have been thousands fewer COVID-19 deaths thus far this year than at the same point last year.