US Life Expectancy Rose to 78.4 years in 2023 - Highest Level Since Pandemic

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News:

U.S. life expectancy rose last year, hitting its highest level since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, released Thursday, found that life expectancy at birth was 78.4 years in 2023. That's a significant rise — nearly a full year — from the life expectancy of 77.5 years in 2022. 'The increase we had this year — the 0.9 year — that's unheard of prior to the pandemic,' said Ken Kochanek, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics who co-authored the report. 'Life expectancy in the United States never goes up or down any more than one- or two-tenths,' he said. 'But then when Covid happened, you had this gigantic drop, and now we have a gigantic drop in Covid. So, you have this gigantic increase in life expectancy.'

From 2019 to 2021, U.S. life expectancy dropped from 78.8 years to 76.4. Covid deaths fell significantly last year: Whereas Covid was the fourth leading cause of death in 2022, it was the 10th in 2023, according to the new report. Last year, Covid was the underlying or contributing cause of more than 76,000 deaths, according to an August CDC report, compared with more than 350,000 such deaths in 2020.
The new findings are based on an analysis of death certificates from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The results showed that the overall death rate for the U.S. population decreased by 6%.

'According to the new report, the top five causes of death in the U.S. last year were heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases. Death rates fell for nine of the top 10 causes in 2023, while the rate of cancer deaths remained fairly unchanged...'

The Atlantic shares some other positive statistics, including reports that America's traffic fatalities keep declining, while drug-overdose deaths also dropped 3% between 2022 and 2023 and there was also a double-digit drop in murder rates.

'America is suddenly getting healthier,' they write. 'No one knows why.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.