Life expectancy in the US falls for the second consecutive year in ’21
NEW YORK — U.S. life expectancy dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, falling by nearly a year from 2020, according to a government report released Wednesday.
In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated American lifespan has shortened by nearly three years. The last comparable decrease happened in the early 1940s, during the height of World War II.
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blamed COVID-19 for about half the decline in 2021, a year when vaccinations became widely available but new coronavirus variants caused waves of hospitalizations and deaths.
Other contributors to the decline are longstanding problems: drug overdoses, heart disease, suicide and chronic liver disease.
“It’s a dismal situation. It was bad before and it’s gotten worse,” said Samuel Preston, a University of Pennsylvania demographer.
Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, given death rates at that time.
U.S. life expectancy rose for decades, but progress stalled before the pandemic.
It was 78 years, 10 months in 2019. In 2020, it dropped to 77 years. Last year, it fell to about 76 years, 1 month.
The last time it was that low was in 1996.
Declines during the pandemic were worse for some racial groups, and some gaps widened. Life expectancy for American Indian and Alaskan Native people saw a decline of more than 6 ½ years since the pandemic began, and is at 65 years. In the same span, life expectancy for Asian Americans dropped by about two years, and stands at 83 ½.
Experts say there are many possible reasons for such differences, including lack of access to quality health care, lower vaccination rates, and a greater share of the population in lower-paying jobs that required them to keep working when the pandemic was at its worst.
The new report is based on provisional data. Life expectancy estimates can change with the addition of more data and further analysis.
Gorbachev’s funeral:
Final farewells for Mikhail Gorbachev will be said in the same place where his rigid Soviet Union predecessors also lay, but he will be buried near men who broke the Soviet mold.
Gorbachev, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who died Tuesday at 91, is to lie in state Saturday in Moscow’s House of Unions.
For decades, the building held the bodies of deceased Soviet leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. All of them were then interred outside the Kremlin walls.
Gorbachev is to be buried in the cemetery of Novodevichy Convent, the resting place for the ousted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had criticized Stalin’s “cult of personality,” and for Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president who became the former USSR’S dominant leader.
The Kremlin has not announced whether Gorbachev will receive a state funeral.
Wis. election ruling: Wisconsin voters with disabilities
can get help returning their ballots, a federal judge said Wednesday, citing a federal law that trumps a recent state Supreme Court ruling and state laws that suggest otherwise.
U.S. District Judge James Peterson’s order comes after the state Supreme Court in July issued a ruling that outlawed absentee ballot drop boxes and said voters must return their own absentee ballot in person to a clerk’s office or other designated site. The decision did not explicitly address voter assistance for returning ballots by mail, but Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe subsequently pointed to a state law that
says a voter must mail their own ballot.
Peterson cited the federal Voting Rights Act. Federal law generally takes precedence over state laws under the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause.
Taiwan-china tensions:
Taiwan’s military fired warning shots at drones from China flying over its outposts near the Chinese coastline, underscoring heightened tensions and the self-ruled island’s resolve to respond to new provocations.
Taiwan’s forces said troops took the action Tuesday after drones were found hovering over the Kinmen island group. Dadan, one of
the islands where a drone was spotted, lies 9 miles off the Chinese coast.
The statement issued Wednesday referred to the unmanned aerial vehicles as being of “civilian use,” but gave no other details.
It said the drones returned to the Chinese city of Xiamen after the shots were fired. Taiwan previously fired only flares as warnings.
La Niña’s ‘triple dip’: The U.N. weather agency is predicting the phenomenon known as La Niña is poised to last through the end of this year, a mysterious “triple dip” — the first this century — caused by three straight years of its effect on climate patterns like drought and flooding worldwide.
The World Meteorological Organization on Wednesday said La Niña conditions, which involve a large-scale cooling of ocean surface temperatures, have strengthened in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific with an increase in trade winds in recent weeks.
The agency’s top official was quick to caution that global warming is not easing.
“It is exceptional to have three consecutive years with a La Niña event. Its cooling influence is temporarily slowing the rise in global temperatures, but it will not halt or reverse the longterm warming trend,” WMO Secretary-general Petteri Taalas said.
La Niña is a natural and cyclical cooling of parts of the equatorial Pacific that changes weather patterns worldwide, as opposed to warming caused by the better-known El Niño — an opposite phenomenon.
La Niña often leads to more Atlantic hurricanes, less rain and more wildfires in the western United States, and agricultural losses in the central U.S. Studies have also shown La Niña is more expensive to the United States than El Niño.
Pakistan flood fallout:
Officials in Pakistan raised concern Wednesday over the spread of waterborne diseases among thousands of flood victims as waters from powerful monsoon rains began to recede in many parts of the country.
Some doctors said initially they were seeing mostly patients traumatized by the flooding, but are now treating people with diarrhea, skin infections and other waterborne ailments in the country’s flood-hit areas.
Many pregnant women living in flood-affected areas were also exposed to risks.
The development has forced the government to deploy additional medical teams, dispatch medicine and provide clean drinking water to survivors, many of whom are living in tents and makeshift homes.