US Life Expectancy Reaches Highest Level Since The Pandemic

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates life expectancy in the US is now higher than at any point since the coronavirus pandemic, predicting an average lifetime of 78.4 years for those born in 2023.

In 2022 the statistic was calculated to be an average of 77.5 years, hinting at a significant rebound from the high mortality rate when COVID infection was at its worst.

"The increase we had this year – the 0.9 year – that's unheard of prior to the pandemic," statistician Ken Kochanek, from the National Center for Health Statistics, told Randi Richardson at NBC News.

2022 vs 2023 life expectancy. (National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Systems)

"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."

Life expectancy at birth is a measure of the average time newborn babies are expected to live if current mortality rates were to remain unchanged. These rates are of course changing all the time, but it's a useful indicator of the state of the health of a nation (or the global population in its entirety).

US life expectancy was its highest in 2015. Calculated to be 78.94 years, the high figure reflected cumulative factors like improvements to medical treatments and diagnostics, sanitation, and nutrition throughout the past century.

The global pandemic introduced an unforeseen factor into the calculations, with 0.6 percent of those infected in the US at risk of dying from the infection early in the outbreak. The full COVID dip came into effect in 2021's measures, when US life expectancy dropped to 76.4 years.

While COVID is still putting people at risk of illness and death, infection from SARS-CoV-2 has a reduced mortality rate thanks largely to vaccination programs and improved treatments. The 4th leading cause of death in 2022, it slipped to 10th place in 2023, putting COVID behind heart disease, cancer, accidents (including drug overdoses), stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's disease, Diabetes mellitus, kidney disease, and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.

Life expectancy continues to differ by sex, though the gap narrowed last year: in the US it's now 75.8 years (up from 74.8 in 2022) for men, and 81.1 years (up from 80.2 in 2022) for women.

Both women and men who were 65 in 2023 have a life expectancy of 19.5 more years, up 0.6 years from 2022 estimates.

The CDC also produces a breakdown based on race and ethnicity. The biggest drops in death rates per 100,000 people were in American Indian and Alaska Native people, down by 11.5 percent for men and 13.5 percent for women.

There's another issue here, which is how healthily we're aging – whether longer lives are being spent in good health or not. This health gap, between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, is wider in the US than anywhere else.

That continues to be a challenge for scientists, health professionals, and us as individuals: increasing lifespans (which are predicted to continue) is generally regarded as positive news, but we also need to the quality – not just the quantity – of lifespan lifts to get the most out of those extra years.

You can view the full CDC report here.