US life expectancy on rise again, climbs back towards pre-pandemic levels

Recovering from the deadly impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, life expectancy in the US has seen a sharp rebound, drawing closer to the pre-pandemic levels.
Life expectancy registered a fall of 2.4 years between 2019 and 2021, but it rose by more than a year in 2022. New data from the

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

shows that it increased by nearly another full year in 2023.
The life expectancy for people born in 2021 now stands at 78.4 years compared to 78.8 years in 2019. The life expectancy rebound is credited to lower death rates from Covid-19 and drug overdose in the past two years as per CDC.
The Covid-19 death rate in 2023 dropped to about 12 per 100,000 people, a quarter of what it was in 2022, making it the 10th leading cause of death instead of the fourth.

How the life expectancy rates improved

There are primarily two reasons behind the improvement in life expectancy rates in the US, as per experts.
The first reason is the drop in CoviD-19 mortality due to vaccination. One of the biggest reasons behind massive drop in life expectancy was due to death toll from the pandemic. With Covid-19 becoming the tenth leading cause of death instead of fourth, life expectancy has seen a boost compared to the pandemic years.

The second reason is the drop in drug overdose deaths to 4% between 2022 and 2023, as per CDC data. In 22, 32.6 deaths occurred per 100,000 people while 2023 saw 31.3 such deaths. In fact, it is the first decrease in more than five years.
Drug overdose death rates are highest among adults aged 35 to 44, nearly double the overall age-adjusted rate. Lowering deaths from causes like this, which disproportionately impact younger age groups, can significantly boost life expectancy.

Other factors

The death rate from heart disease, the leading cause of death in the US., fell by 3% between 2022 and 2023. Death rates for diabetes, kidney disease, and chronic liver disease too dropped by over 5%. However declines for cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and Alzheimer’s disease were more modest.
CDC’s data shows that women are likely to live five years longer than men as their life expectancy at birth stood at 81.1 years in 2021, compared with 75.8 years for men.

Death rates declined across all racial and ethnic groups analyzed in 2023. However, age-adjusted rates remained significantly higher for American Indian men and Black men. American Indian women, White men, and Black women also had above-average death rates.
In a worrying trend among infants, rates of congenital malformations and low birth weights, the leading causes of infant deaths have increased. This could be related to the increase in births in states with abortion bans, which is also linked to a rise in the number of women who are carrying fetuses with lethal congenital anomalies to term. After a sharp rise in infant mortality in 2022, rates remained steady in 2023, according to new CDC data.