American Life Expectancy Falls Again Due to Covid And Drug Overdoses.
Sadly American life expectancy fell again in 2021 because of Covid and drug overdoses according to the CDC. The Hill
“The average U.S. life expectancy shortened by seven months in 2021, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), driven mainly by COVID-19 and drug overdoses from synthetic opioids.
According to a pair of CDC reports, life expectancy dropped for the second consecutive year, from 77 years to 76.4 years. This follows a major drop of 1.8 years in 2020, putting life expectancy from birth at about the same level it was in 1996.”
Life expectancy was supposed to continue rising due to advances in medical technology that allowed more people to live long past what previous generations did. Unfortunately, Covid 19 and narcotics got in the way of the upward trajectory and continued weighing down the up arrow on the graph of average life duration. Hopefully 2022 will prove to be a year when the average life expectancy begins to point start going up again but that will depend on a variety of factors and it may not be easy to right the ship in just 1 year.
