New York leads US in drop in life expectancy

Experts believe the drop in life expectancy in 2020 will stabilize

Life expectancy dropped across the United States in 2020, but nowhere did it drop more than in New York.

New data released on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that life expectancy in New York fell from 80.7 years in 2019 to just 77.7 in 2020 — a three-year drop due primarily to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and “diseases of despair” like drug overdoses.

New York still has one of the higher life expectancies in the country, and experts have predicted that the state’s life expectancy will stablise or even rebound due to the effects of Covid vaccines and a stronger economy.

But the stark data from New York and across the country illustrates the remarkable toll that 2020 took on a country that was already seeing an extended and previously unprecedented decline in life expetancy even before the outbreak of the pandemic.

Life expectancy in the US reached its peak in 2014 at 78.9 years, before falling slightly in subsequent years. It rebounded to 78.8 years in 2019, before the effects of the Covid pandemic saw it fall to 77 years in 2020.

Life expectancy in the US has for years been lower than a number of common comparator countries in Europe and Asia, and that gap has expanded in significantly in the last decade, with experts commonly blaming the country’s healthcare system, high rates of wealth inequality, and racism for the discrepancy with other wealthy nations.

Covid unquestionably took a toll as well. The US has had more Covid deaths than any other country on the planet, followed by Brazil, India, and Russia. The virus and its knock-on effects seem to be a primary reason why life expectancy fell in every state and the District of Columbia in 2020, with Hawaii experiencing the lowest drop life expectancy from 80.9 to 80.7 years.

Hawaii has the highest life expectancy of any state in the US, while Mississippi, where people live just 71.9 years on average, has the lowest. States in the west and northeast tend to have the highest life expectancy in the country along with geographical outliers like Minnesota, while states in the Southeast and Rust Belt have among the lower life expectancies.

Every state that joined the Confederacy during the Civil War is in the bottom half of states in terms of life expectancy, with two exceptions: Virginia, which is 18th, and Florida, which follows it at 19th.