U.S. residents are now living to the ripe old age of 79 on average, federal officials say — the highest point ever recorded.
The CDC announced on Thursday that American expectancy set records in 2024, reflecting the nation’s slow but decisive recovery from the deadly Covid-19 pandemic.
The milestone also reflects a major drop in drug overdoses, as well as declining death rates from commonly fatal conditions such as heart disease and cancer.
“It’s pretty much good news all the way around,” Robert Anderson of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics told AP, though he cautioned that the U.S. still trails behind other developed nations such as Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, and Canada.
“Seventy-nine years is impressive for us, but not so much for most of these other developed countries,” he said.
U.S. life expectancy last peaked in 2014 at just under 79 years and then stagnated for a while. Then came Covid, which as of this January has killed an estimated 7.1m people across the world, as well as potentially tens of millions more if indirect deaths are included.
Now the virus has entirely dropped out of the top ten causes of death, making way for suicide — even though deaths by suicide actually decreased too (just not by as much).
Aside from the pandemic, the figures reflected an unprecedented 26 percent plunge in deaths by drug overdose, the biggest such decline ever recorded.
The drop in death rates occurred in both men and women, and across all racial and ethnic groups.
Heart disease remained the most common cause of death, followed by cancer and unintentional injuries. Those all fell, thanks largely to medical advances, officials said.
All that said, it’s unclear what 2025 and 2026 will bring. Over the past 12 months, the CDC has cut the number of recommended vaccines for U.S. children even as rates of measles and whooping cough soared.
This winter was reportedly among the worst flu seasons in decades, while Health and Human Services secretary Robert K. Kennedy Jr. has slashed vaccine research grants, while two thirds of Americans are now worried about being able to afford healthcare
