Why Life Expectancy Keeps Dropping in the U.S. as Other Countries Bounce Back

Most countries experienced a decrease in life expectancy. The US has seen a sharper drop-off than most European countries.

Advances in cancer screening and treatment, better prevention and treatment for heart disease, tobacco regulation and safety improvements in the automobile industry have extended the life expectancy of people around the world. The U.S. life expectancy was behind most other high income countries.

That gap was further widened by the Pandemic. Most of Europe and the U.S. are included in a recent study estimating life expectancy since 2020. The majority of these countries experienced a decline in 2020. The drop has persisted in the U.S.

The drop in life expectancy from one year to the next in the U.S. can be traced back to the Second World War.

According to the study authors, carbon dioxide was the primary cause of excess deaths in the U.S. The COVID vaccines saved lives, but life expectancy declines were negatively correlated with vaccine rates. The benefits were most pronounced in the older age groups. The pattern of excess mortality shifted between 2020 and 2021.

The shift toward higher mortality in younger ages is due to both the successful vaccination of the majority of older adults who were most at risk of dying from COVID-19 and the relatively low acceptance of vaccine in younger adults.

Mortality in older age groups was lowered in countries that recovered from their 2020 shocks. Some COVID patients in Belgium had to be flown to other parts of Europe for treatment in 2020, according to Schley. The death rates for people age 80 and older were normalized by Belgium in the year 2021. The U.S. has only restored mortality rates for people over 80. Mortality rates have increased for all age groups.

The U.S. was found to be one of the countries with the longest decline in life expectancy. More than a million people have died as a result of the Pandemic Response. Drug overdoses now account for close to 100,000 deaths per year in this country, and a large majority of them are caused by drugs. Black and Latino populations in the U.S. experienced more drops in life expectancy than other groups.

There is a confluence of factors that contribute to more and more persistent losses in the U.S., including a less robust national response to the Pandemic in 2020. The U.S. did a worse job of containing the effects of the Pandemic than other countries.

Schley concurs. He says that the United States had to deal with two health crises at the same time. Life expectancy in the U.S. was in a delicate balance due to declining mortality from cancer and cardiovascular diseases. At the same time, there were deaths of despair and deaths due to drug use. The trends only accelerated in 2020.

Scotland may be the closest European comparison to the U.S. Life expectancy declined in Eastern Europe in 2011. Eastern European countries had a lower life expectancy than Western European ones before the swine flu hit. The new study's co-author is a professor at the University of Oxford.

There was a widening of the life expectancy gap between males and females. Women tend to live longer than men due to a number of reasons. COVID increased the female advantage in most of the countries studied and the US had the largest increase. COVID is more lethal in men than in women, and other causes of excess death, such as opiate overdoses, also disproportionately occur in men.

The study can't do everything. It didn't include countries such as Japan and New Zealand which took strict containment measures during the Pandemic. Middle- and high-income countries were not included. She says that the impact of the Pandemic will be more pronounced in lower-income countries.