With advances in modern medicine and people adopting healthier lifestyle habits, life expectancy around the world has increased drastically from what it was in the 1800s.
Although, according to a recent study by medRxiv (which has not been peer-reviewed yet), life expectancy in the United States has been slightly declining since 2019.
Life expectancy decreased from an average of 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 years in 2020. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic throughout 2020, life expectancy dropped again down to 76.60 years in 2021.
Outside of the United States in 19 peer countries, life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 decreased by just an average of 0.57 years. But it actually increased between 2020 and 2021, going up 0.28 years.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were over 3 million deaths in the United States in 2020. The top cause of death was heart disease, accounting for nearly 700,000 deaths. Second on the list was cancer, at just over 600,000 deaths.
COVID-19 caused 350,831 deaths in 2020, per the CDC, and was the third leading cause of death for Americans -- ahead of accidents/unintentional injuries, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer's, and diabetes.
"This speaks volumes about the life consequences of how the US handled the pandemic," Dr. Steven Woolf, study author and director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a statement to CNN. "What happened in the U.S. is less about the variants than the levels of resistance to vaccination and the public's rejection of practices, such as masking and mandates, to reduce viral transmission."
The study also showed that the biggest decreases in life expectancy in 2020 "occurred among Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations." Between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy among US Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations had the biggest decreases.
However, life expectancy in 2021 only decreased for the non- Hispanic White population in the United States.
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