’20 life expectancy dips to 77 years

U.S. reports covid-19 as third-leading cause of death last year

Life expectancy at birth in the United States 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 same day health officials said 2021 is shaping up to be even deadlier.

It’s too early to say for sure, since all the death reports for November and December won’t be in for many weeks. But based on available information, it seems likely 2021 will surpass last year’s record number of deaths by at least 15,000, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death statistics.

Anderson said it’s likely that the nation will see more than 3.4 million deaths in 2021. Other experts said they think deaths for the year will end up either about the same as in 2020, or higher.

The average expected U.S. 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. Such jumps between provisional and final numbers are common, but 2020’s difference was higher than usual because of a lag in death records from some states that switched to new electronic reporting systems, Anderson said.

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 United States, 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. This year, the number is already at 356,000, and the final tally could hit 370,000, Anderson said.

Experts also think the 2021 numbers will be affected by a drug overdose epidemic that is expected to — for the first time — surpass 100,000 deaths in a calendar year.

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, covid-19, 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.