The life expectancy of Americans rose again in 2022 after two years of sharp decline, without returning to its level before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to health authorities on Wednesday.
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By gaining 1.1 years between 2021 and 2022, life expectancy at birth stood at 77.5 years last year in the United States, according to initial estimates from health authorities.
This improvement is “mainly due to the decline in mortality linked to Covid-19,” wrote the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).
But this increase “does not completely compensate for the loss of 2.4 years of life expectancy between 2019 and 2021,” they added.
Before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019, the life expectancy of Americans was 78.8 years.
The drop in mortality linked to Covid-19 last year was partly offset by an increase in mortality linked to flu or pneumonia, health authorities noted.
The gap in life expectancy between men and women narrowed slightly in 2022, to 5.4 years. In detail, last year American women had a life expectancy of 80.2 years, compared to 74.8 for men.
Considering different populations, life expectancy for Native Americans was the lowest in 2022, at just 67.9 years — compared to 72.8 for black people, 77.5 for white people, 80 for Hispanics, and 84.5 for Asians.
In a separate report, health authorities studied in particular the number of suicides, which continued to increase in 2022, reaching around 49,450 suicides, according to provisional figures.
The suicide rate was thus 14.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2022, the highest since 1941, according to this report.
After reaching a low in 2000, the suicide rate has risen sharply in the United States — despite a slight decline in 2019 and 2020.
Recently, the United States set up a hotline with a simple, three-digit number (988) for people in distress.
