Life expectancy statistics in 2020 took a steep dive downward, largely because of the covid-19 pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control reported in December that the average person born in 2020 can expect to live 77.0 years. That is a drop of nearly two years from the 2019 figure of 78.8. It’s the largest one-year decrease since 1943, when the country was in the middle of World War II and a lot of soldiers were dying.
For men, the 2020-to-2019 comparison is 74.2 to 76.3, down 2.1 years. For women, it’s 79.9 to 81.4, down 1.5 years.
Covid-19 is a big driver of this decline, to the point that it ranked as the third-most frequent cause of death in 2020, trailing only the longtime fatality leaders of heart disease and cancer. But it’s not the only factor.
The CDC reported that 3.38 million people died in the United States in 2020 — an increase of nearly 529,000 from the year before.
However, covid-19 was the underlying cause of death for only 350,000 people. That implies that some or all of the 179,000 other deaths were from causes other than the pandemic.
Still, there’s no dodging the Covid-19 factor, which played the biggest role by far in knocking American life expectancy below 78 years for the first time since 2007.
—Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
