Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1.1 million Americans died from the viral disease. Now the emergency order for the pandemic is over, and recent data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that life expectancy has indeed rebounded.
However, it hasn’t rebounded as much as some had hoped.
“The not-so-good news is that the increase in life expectancy only accounted for less than 50% of the loss that was experienced between 2019 and 2021,” explained Elizabeth Arias, a demographer in the CDC's Division of Vital Statistics and co-author on the research, according to NPR.
In the paper published by the CDC, authors said that overall life expectancy increased by 1.1 years, from 76.4 to 77.5. This is a measure of life expectancy at birth.
“The increase of 1.1 years in life expectancy from 2021 to 2022 primarily resulted from decreases in mortality due to COVID-19 (84.2% of the positive contribution), heart disease (3.6%), unintentional injuries (2.6%), cancer (2.2%), and homicide (1.5%),” said the paper.
Life expectancy increased more for males at 1.3 years compared to 0.9 years for females. This was attributed mostly to decreases in mortality due to COVID-19 (81.2%), heart disease (4.6%), unintentional injuries (2.9%), cancer (2.4%), and homicide (2.3%), said the paper. However, women are still expected to live longer at 80.2 years compared to 74.8 years for men.
Life expectancy also increased in 2022 for all ethnic categories tracked by the CDC. During the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Last year, it dropped to fourth.
Yet, as Arias noted, there were some factors preventing an even greater increase in life expectancy. These include increases in mortality due to influenza and pneumonia (25.5%), perinatal conditions (21.5%), kidney disease (13.0%), nutritional deficiencies (12.6%), and congenital malformations (5.9%).
“To me, these numbers are rather bleak,” said Jacob Bor, associate professor of global health and epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, per NPR. “The extent to which life expectancy has recovered is far short of what people had hoped.”
According to Vox, authors of the study “hypothesized that U.S.
mortality due to COVID-19 was higher than that in European countries due to higher rates of underlying conditions like obesity and diabetes.”
“We’re starting from a lower spot, and we sunk faster than other countries,” said Joshua Sharfstein, a physician and epidemiologist who directs the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, according to the outlet. “And now we’re trying to crawl our way out.”
Vox noted that the increase in perinatal conditions might be linked to the summer 2021 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health U.S. Supreme Court decision that paved the way for more restrictive abortion access in the country. Even as COVID-19 caused life expectancy to plummet in 2020 and 2021, death rates due to perinatal conditions decreased in those years. Then, the Dobbs decision started to impact access.
“There’s a very strong relationship between access to abortion and infant mortality – and infant mortality went up,” Shaefstein said. Lack of abortion access can also mean a lack of access to maternal care providers, Vox added.