Life expectancy in the United States fell for the second year running in 2021, government figures show, declining all the way to its lowest level since 1996. Data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics released Thursday put U.S. life expectancy at 76.4 years at birth last year, down from 77 in 2020. Deaths from COVID contributed to the drop, with life expectancy now almost 2.5 years shorter in the U.S. than it was before the outbreak of the pandemic. Drugs also played a part in the decline—there were 106,699 overdose deaths in 2021, an annual rise of 14 percent. “This one, it’s sort of across-the-board bad news,” Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, told the Washington Post. “We’ve gone since 1996 without improving. That’s incredible, given how much we’ve learned about medicine, how much we’ve spent.”
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