(The Hill) – New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that more Americans died in 2021 than any other year in the country’s history, as the coronavirus pandemic raged and the death rates were attributed to cancer, diabetes and stroke. Pink..
Data released through the end of the third quarter of the year shows a death rate of 1,058.8 per 100,000 Americans, an increase of nearly 10% from the 12-month period a year earlier. and a jump of 21% compared to 2019.
The rising rate resulted in the death of nearly 3.5 million Americans in the 12 months ending in September 2021, the highest number of deaths ever recorded in the United States in a single year.
Much of the rise in the death toll has been caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which claimed the lives of 415,000 Americans in 2021, a figure higher than in the outbreak’s first year, even though vaccines were widely available for most of the year. The coronavirus was responsible for more than one in 10 deaths in the United States last year, CDC data shows.
Other causes of death increased slightly. Chronic liver disease claimed more lives, while deaths from diabetes, heart disease and strokes increased.
The data is not complete, but early signs suggest drug overdose-related deaths have also risen substantially. Preliminary data shows more than 105,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, up more than 10% from the previous year.
The unprecedented death toll means the average life expectancy of an American has likely continued to decline over the past year, a series of declines not seen since the Spanish flu pandemic more than a year ago. century.
A study by researchers from the Urban Institute, the University of Colorado and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) estimated that life expectancy in the United States fell last year to 76.6 years , down more than two years from the 2019 rate. Meanwhile, life expectancy rates in other rich countries increased between 2020 and 2021, after recording a smaller decline last year.
“While other high-income countries saw their life expectancies increase in 2021, recouping about half of their losses, U.S. life expectancies continued to decline,” said VCU sociologist Steven Woolf, one of the study’s authors, in a statement. “That speaks volumes about the life consequences of how the United States has handled the pandemic, and in a country where the U.S. Constitution and the 10th Amendment grants public health authority to the states, I think the American catastrophe speaks volumes about the policies and behavior of the United States. governors – at least some of them.
Life expectancy has fallen the most in recent years among Hispanic and black populations, which the researchers attributed to “the legacy of systemic racism and inadequacies in America’s handling of the pandemic.”
Ryan Masters, a sociologist at the University of Colorado and lead author of the study, said high rates of obesity and heart disease make the US population more vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic than people in other wealthy countries. .
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