U.S. life expectancy fell as pandemic took heavy toll

Life expectancy at birth fell to 77 years in 2020, a continued slide in a reliable gauge of Americans’ health as the coronavirus pandemic surged through the country, killing more than 350,000 people, the government reported Wednesday.

The average expected life span declined 1.8 years over 2019. That was up from July, when the Biden administration reported provisional results for 2020 that showed a 1.5-year drop. Death rates rose for every age group except children ages 1 to 14, with COVID-19 becoming the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., behind heart disease and cancer, according to the report from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The disease caused by the coronavirus was the underlying cause of death for 350,831 people last year — 10.4 percent of the 3,383,729 deaths recorded.

Life expectancy had been ticking down in recent years, a troubling trend driven by drug overdose deaths and suicides. But the pandemic has caused much larger declines.

The 1.8-year drop was the largest reduction in a single year in more than 75 years.

Suicide fell from the top 10 causes of death in 2020, replaced by COVID-19.

The other nine killers of Americans remained the same, though in some cases they changed order. The top 10 are: heart disease, cancer, COVID19, unintentional injuries, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease. Together, they accounted for 74.1 percent of all deaths in the United States.

The infant mortality rate dropped 2.9 percent to a record low of 541.9 per 100,000 live births.