Not for a hundred years has there been such a pronounced drop in U.S. life expectancy, from 79 years in 2019 to 76 just two years later, in 2021, according to federal researchers. It’s easy to chalk this up entirely to the impact of COVID, and the virus was certainly the main culprit, but it would be wrong to suggest this dismaying trend is the result merely of forces out of our collective hands.
The whole world was hit by the virus. But while most of our peers in Europe, Asia and Oceania have started recovering since the shock of the pandemic’s first year, America’s life expectancy has kept declining, with the downturn especially precipitous among Native American and Alaska Native communities, who’ve lost a staggering six-and-a-half years of expected life, bringing them down to just 65.
For reference, the average person in Portugal, a country with a per-capita GDP about a third the United States’, could expect to live five years longer than the average American, and 16 years longer than the average Native American.
It’s worth remembering that U.S. life expectancy had been plateauing or even dropping for years before this virus struck, driven by obesity, drug overdoses, suicide and chronic health conditions like heart disease. Some consider these problems mere personal failings, but they’re downstream of policy — a needlessly inefficient and expensive health care system, a longtime punitive response to drug dependency and a work culture that looks down on sick days and time off, among other things. COVID just made it all worse.
This news should come as a wake-up call that, after decades of progressively longer, happier, healthier and more prosperous lives, we’re backsliding. It’s especially disturbing that so many of the climbing causes of mortality — including suicide and drug use — are so-called deaths of despair. Some solutions, like choosing to get the new COVID boosters for the omicron variant, will fall on us as individuals. Others are on us as a society. Long live a coherent policy program to help us all live longer.