CDC: COVID Lingering Effects A Drag on Life Expectancy
Experts who monitor life expectancy have been anticipating a “rebound” in longevity stats post-COVID, and this week they got it. Sort of…
Life expectancy in 2022 rose more than a full year, to 77.5 years, in data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than four-fifths of this positive jump was attributable to a drop in covid-19 deaths.
But the rebound in 2022, which the CDC had anticipated after studying death rates, regained less than half the years lost to the pandemic, the federal health agency reported.
“The amount of recovery is not as much as we’d like to see,” Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said after reviewing the report.
He said many peer countries suffered smaller drops in life expectancy and rebounded more quickly from covid-19’s impact.
“It’s disturbing but not surprising to me that we have not experienced the recovery that other countries have,” Woolf said.
In 2019, U.S. life expectancy at birth stood at 78.8 years. That figure cratered to 76.4 in 2021, the lowest since 1996. That was due partly to the extraordinary wave of covid deaths in January and February of that year as the United States had only begun to roll out vaccines. The following winter saw another short but intense wave of deaths as the omicron variant of the virus reached the country, creating the last major surge in pandemic deaths.
“There appears to have been some recovery from covid, but we still have a way to go,” said William Schaffner, an infectious-disease physician at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
“Covid remains with us and continues to put people in the hospital, and have a substantial mortality rate associated with it, particularly among older people and people who are immunocompromised,” Schaffner said.
The rise in certain chronic diseases in the United States — and slower progress in combating others — put the nation in a vulnerable position when the novel virus arrived. A scattered and politically polarized response to the pandemic played a role in the dire death toll that followed, as did resistance to vaccination and other public health measures. No other wealthy country experienced so high a rate of death per capita from covid.
The new numbers are clearly positive — compared with 2021. But the same data show the dramatic, and protracted, impact of the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy dropped 2.4 years, and the 2022 jump restored only 1.1. years of that deficit. (Men lost 2.8 years in those first two years, and women 2.1 years.)
The full data sets from the CDC can be viewed here:
Instead of getting (yet) (another) Moderna booster, I got the Novavax. Side effects were minimal (the Moderna knocked me out the next day) and hey. So far so good. Ask your doctor if Novavax is right for you.Report
I got the latest Pfizer a few weeks ago. Also got my flu shot at the same time, same arm. Nothing except the usual injection site discomfort the next day (muscle tissue does not like having fluids forced into it). Well, and no Covid or flu. During a recent Covid outbreak at the memory care center, my wife tested positive but had no symptoms.Report
I had fewer side effects with the “new” Pfizer than any previous shots (other than the very first one). I am presuming that’s because the proteins this one targets are quite different than the previous ones. The worst reaction was july 2022, the “OG forumula” third booster (got the bivalent in November 2022)
I currently have a couple students isolating with COVID, it’s definitely still out there. Based on reports in her area, my 87-year-old-but-fully-vaccinated mom has gone back to masking out in public. I’m not quite there yet myself where I live but if she does when I’m up at Christmas i will tooReport
Hey, question for everyone: What percentage do you think the excess deaths were caused by vaccine denier and anti-maskers, and what percentage are just the fault of our really crappy healthcare system where a large percentage of people end up waiting until they have to go to the emergency room for care, and what percentage are the fault of the government for not actually rolling out systematic ways to deal with infection like contact tracing and actual real lockdowns that other wealthy countries did?
I mean, we’re really bad compared to other wealthy nations at dealing with covid in at least three ways: Personal stupidity and selfishness about disease prevention, political stupidity that keeps us from actually fixing healthcare at any time in the past, and political stupidity that kept us from doing anything during Covid. What had the most impact?
We’ll probably never know the answer, but it’s an interesting question.Report
Excess deaths, mostly panic and despair. Unemployment, drug use, people not going to the doctor. Covid deaths, I think we’re basically tied with the UK and Italy, with a few other countries nearby. The likely answer is reporting standards.Report
“what percentage are the fault of the government for not actually rolling out systematic ways to deal with infection like contact tracing and actual real lockdowns that other wealthy countries did?”
(none of those things actually worked. every country saw the same COVID surge, just at different times.)Report
as for “what SHOULD we have done then”, what we should have done was what President Donald J Trump suggested: mail everybody a check for two thousand dollars and tell them to stay home for two weeks. And it says so much about this country’s government that the biggest bipartisan consensus in Congress of the past twenty years was that we should not do that, and that both sides spent twenty-five hours a day for three months working out exactly how to not do that.
I mean, you had Nancy Peloci and Mitch McConnell do the clasping-hands meme with the caption “the worst thing imaginable would be if we sent money to someone who Didn’t Deserve It”.Report