According to data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans' life expectancy fell 0.9 year on average last year, to 76.1 years. It was a smaller drop than in 2020, when life expectancy fell by 1.8 years, but the combined figures for the two years were the highest since the 1920s, according to the CDC. "None of us are OK," said Steve Woolf, emeritus director of Virginia Commonwealth University's Center on Society and Health.
The data showed that certain groups were particularly hard hit by the pandemic as well as the opioid crisis, which claimed 108,000 lives last year. According to the data, Indigenous Americans had the greatest drop in life expectancy in 2021, at 1.9 years, bringing their life expectancy to 65.2 years, down 6.6 years from 2019.
Higher Covid-19 death rates than in 2020, unintentional injuries such as overdoses, and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis all contributed to the decline among Native Americans.
"We have a crisis of early deaths among American Indians," said Donald Warne, associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of North Dakota's School of Medicine and Health Sciences and a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe.
According to the data, Covid-19 accounted for more than half of the increase in deaths among white people in 2021, while unintentional injuries such as overdoses accounted for about 12%.
According to the data, Black people's life expectancy declined less than white people's in 2021, reflecting in part the higher burden of deaths among some minority groups in the early stages of the pandemic. According to the CDC, black people in the United States had a life expectancy of 70.8 years last year, while white people had a life expectancy of 76.4 years.
"We continue to see disparities for people of color," said Ada Stewart, a family physician with Cooperative Health in Columbia, South Carolina, and the American Academy of Family Physicians' board chair. "They fared poorly during the pandemic."
Black and Hispanic Americans have been particularly hard hit by an overdose crisis caused primarily by the spread of fentanyl manufactured in improvised Mexican labs. According to Karen Scott, president of the nonprofit Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts, higher rates of death in the category that includes overdoses reflect poorer access to treatment for many minority groups.
"Addressing the overdose crisis necessitates acknowledging that you must work on multiple fronts at the same time," she said.
Flu, pneumonia, and Alzheimer's deaths all decreased in 2021, according to the data. In the case of Alzheimer's, a lower death toll in 2021 reversed a high tally in 2020, when deaths from the disease increased 18% from the previous year.
"The truly vulnerable were placed in perilous situations," said Beth Kallmyer, Alzheimer's Association vice president of care and support.