During the Christmas Holidays, we’re always looking for a little bit of good news. The best we have is that Americans are living longer again, continuing to improve from our 2020 numbers again. Hopefully that trend will continue, and no one pushes bad behavior that could take us back to the “good old days” of life expectancy numbers from the 1900s-1950s.
“U.S. life expectancy rose last year, hitting its highest level since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” reports Randi Richardson with NBC News.
So the USA is now at 78.4 years. It was a jump of almost a year, which doesn’t sound like much, but at the National Center for Health Statistics, their lead statistician insisted the increase was significant.
“Life expectancy in the United States never goes up or down any more than one- or two-tenths,” he said. “But then when Covid happened, you had this gigantic drop, and now we have a gigantic drop in Covid. So, you have this gigantic increase in life expectancy.”
So it was a big deal when Life expectancy fell from 78.8 years (2019) to 76.4 years (2021) according to Richardson, based on CDC data.
NBC News’ analysis shows that America experienced declines in COVID-19 deaths, far fewer than the hundreds of thousands during the pandemic.
But there were still 76,000 deaths last year from the coronavirus. That’s still too many. Those numbers could be lower, but vaccine skepticism still exists. And state and local governments are looking to score points with those who believe that the pandemic was a hoax.
“A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a November 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.
“Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.”
Not surprisingly, “Louisianans have an average life expectancy of 72.2 years, one of the worst in the country,” Axios reports.
With all the incoming national leaders promoting vaccine skepticism, this worrying result soon could be a national trend.
The CDC also shows that overdose deaths are down, the best numbers since 2018. But heart disease and cancer are up. Could it be the increase in cigarette sales, the first in 20 years (according to the FTC), as well as the increase in e-cigarette use among adults and younger Americans? Hope our new administration deals with that problem, not making it easier to vape.
The National Academies Press revealed that life expectancy was 68 years in the 1950s, ten years less than it is today. And it was even worse than that before, as life expectancy was 47.9 years for men and 50.7 years for women between 1900-1902. Let’s hope our new leadership doesn’t back policies that would take us back to those bad old days.