Life expectancy in 2019 in the US was nearly 80 years, but a year later because of the pandemic that plunged to 77 years, ushering in the largest spike in mortality in 100 years. In 2021, the life span dropped to 76.1 years. According to a tentative analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for some Americans, life expectancy is even lower. 

Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University, stated, "The results of this study are very disturbing, this shows that U.S. life expectancy in 2021 was even lower than in 2020," adding that other high-income countries have witnessed a bounce back in life expectancy, which Woolf argues makes the US results "all the more tragic."

American Indian and Alaskan Native people were among the top categories affected dramatically by drops in life expectancy in 2021. The life expectancy for this group between 2020 and 2021 fell by almost two years, from 67.1 in 2020 compared to 65.2 in 2021.

Woolf expressed feeling horrific and commented that "the losses in the Native American population have been terrible during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it reflects a lot of barriers that tribal communities face in getting access to care."

Most Native Americans and indigenous peoples in the US reside on reservations (areas assigned through treaties dating back to the 1800s) that don't host the basic necessities of human rights, like adequate water, sanitation, and affordable health care facilities for treatment. Thus, residents have to travel grave distances with the risk of facing prejudice in care or no care at all. 

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White Americans saw a larger decrease in life expectancy in 2021 than Black and Hispanic Americans, as this reflected the reverse of what happened in 2020 when Hispanic Americans saw a 4-year decline and Black Americans saw a 3-year drop. Life expectancy for white Americans declined by a year in 2021 to 76.4 while Black Americans saw a decline to 70.8 years, and Hispanic Americans a decline to 77.7 years. Asian Americans, among the lesser categories affected, saw a 0.1-year decline to 83.5 years.

According to Woolf's analysis, he says the greater drop in life expectancy for white Americans could reflect approaches in some parts of the country toward vaccines and pandemic measures. The US health care system is fragmented whereby public health is determined by the states rather than the government, indicating that there were 50 different pandemic response plans. States that implemented more relaxed COVID restrictions and recorded lower vaccination rates saw higher excess deaths during the "delta" and "omicron" variations than states which aggressively enforced vaccination campaigns, masking, and other mitigation requirements.

An NPR analysis reported that death rates from COVID-19 in counties that swayed heavily toward former President Donald Trump's precautionary policies saw higher death rates than those that favored President Biden's. According to the CDC in February, only 64% of the population, or approximately 212 million Americans, is fully vaccinated.

Injuries, heart disease, chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, and suicide additionally contributed to the life expectancy downturn while the upsurge in unintentional injuries in 2021 was largely motivated by drug overdose deaths which escalated during the pandemic.

The US has been lacking improvement procedures for years in things like heart disease, the country's number one killer, and the gap in life expectancy between the US and other countries has been growing for not years, but decades, according to John Haaga, a member of Maryland's Commission on Aging. 

Haaga further noted that the pandemic "has in effect wiped out the health gains that the US has made in the 20th century," adding his extreme shock of observing "this second year of crash basically wiping out the meager gains made during the century."

"A lot of much poorer countries do much better than us in life expectancy," he says. "It's not genetics, it's that we have been falling behind for 50 years."