Declining U.S. life expectancy fell further in 2021 due to COVID and drug overdoses
LA TimesDeb Walker, of Chester, Vt., visits the grave of her daughter Brooke Goodwin, who died in March 2021 after a drug overdose. The numbers, released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mark the second consecutive year of decline in average life expectancy, a streak that hasn’t happened in more than a century. The year 2021 saw 106,699 drug overdose deaths in the United States, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics said in a separate report released Thursday. Early COVID-19 death rates were highest among Latino and American Indian/Alaska Native communities, an experience that appears to have prompted them to get vaccinated in 2021, Woolf said. The ages at which people died last year also help explain how average life expectancy at birth dropped from 77 years in 2020 to 76.4 years in 2021.