Covid-19 claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States in 2020, driving a record increase in the death rate and a drop in life expectancy of nearly two years, according to final 2020 death data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Life expectancy at birth fell 1.8 years in 2020, from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 years, the largest single-year decline in more than 75 years, since World War II.
The death rate — about 835 deaths per 100,000 people — jumped nearly 17% from 2019, the sharpest increase in more than a century since the CDC has been tracking this data. COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death for Americans and has shortened life expectancy by nearly two years, a drop not seen since World War II, a new government report shows.
Life expectancy dropped from 78.8 in 2010 to 77 in 2020 as the age-adjusted death rate increased 17%, going from 715 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019 to 835 deaths per 100,000 in 2020, researchers from the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. We haven’t seen a decline like this since 1943,” said Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
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Death rates increased for all age groups aged 15 and older. The leading causes of death were heart disease and cancer, followed by COVID-19. Other causes of death were drug overdoses and other unintentional injuries, followed by stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, and kidney disease.
But they have risen again: “The bulk of the increases are due to the synthetic opioid category, most of which is illicit fentanyl,” he noted. There were also increases in cardiovascular deaths, heart disease and stroke, and, in particular, Alzheimer’s disease. Also, increases in deaths were seen in diabetes and pneumonia.
