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Stats United States

US Life Expectancy Rose to 78.4 years in 2023 - Highest Level Since Pandemic (nbcnews.com) 28

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: U.S. life expectancy rose last year, hitting its highest level since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, released Thursday, found that life expectancy at birth was 78.4 years in 2023. That's a significant rise — nearly a full year — from the life expectancy of 77.5 years in 2022. "The increase we had this year — the 0.9 year — that's unheard of prior to the pandemic," said Ken Kochanek, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics who co-authored the report. "Life expectancy in the United States never goes up or down any more than one- or two-tenths," he said. "But then 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."

From 2019 to 2021, U.S. life expectancy dropped from 78.8 years to 76.4. Covid deaths fell significantly last year: Whereas Covid was the fourth leading cause of death in 2022, it was the 10th in 2023, according to the new report. Last year, Covid was the underlying or contributing cause of more than 76,000 deaths, according to an August CDC report, compared with more than 350,000 such deaths in 2020.

The new findings are based on an analysis of death certificates from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The results showed that the overall death rate for the U.S. population decreased by 6%.

"According to the new report, the top five causes of death in the U.S. last year were heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases. Death rates fell for nine of the top 10 causes in 2023, while the rate of cancer deaths remained fairly unchanged..."

The Atlantic shares some other positive statistics, including reports that America's traffic fatalities keep declining, while drug-overdose deaths also dropped 3% between 2022 and 2023 and there was also a double-digit drop in murder rates.

"America is suddenly getting healthier," they write. "No one knows why."

US Life Expectancy Rose to 78.4 years in 2023 - Highest Level Since Pandemic

Comments Filter:
  • Survivor bias? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Saturday December 21, 2024 @06:08PM (#65031467)

    Perhaps people that would have died in 2023 due to old age had already been snuffed out due to the peak pandemic years of 2020-1.

    • Not just "old age" but less healthy people in general, or people who are less careful about their health or people who are reckless. But keep in mind that this life expectancy is still lower than it was just a few years ago.
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Bingo. All while criminality related trend continues as population ages. Murder is almost totally a young man's game.

    • Got it on the first try!

      The summary says: "America is suddenly getting healthier," they write. "No one knows why." I'm pretty sure we are not getting that much healthier -it is just that the really unhealthy ones died off in the pandemic. If we were a few years from expiration, the pandemic bumped up our use by date.

    • Hospitals got paid 20% more per covid victim. There were meeting of hospital executives where they talked about how they could get the number as high as possible.

      National File has obtained a recording of a Zoom video conference call between physicians and a marketing director at Novant Heath New Hanover Regional Medical Center, a group of 20 hospitals, clinics, and offices that treat patients in North Carolina and South Carolina.

      In the recording, Mary Rudyk, MD tells Director of Marketing Carolyn Fisher and another hospital employee that she wants the hospitals to become more “scary to the public” by inflating the number of COVID-19 patients, and by using messaging that falsely tells individuals “If you don’t get vaccinated, you know you’re going to die.”

      After the first speaker seems to answer a question about how COVID-19 patient counts are determined and shared with the public, MacDonald responds, “I guess my feeling at this point in time is, maybe we need to be completely a little bit more scary to the public.” She then introduces her idea to inflate the total number of COVID-19 patients by counting patients who recovered. “There are many people still hospitalized that we’re considering post-COVID, but they’re not counted in those numbers,” Rudyk explains, “So how do we include those post-COVID people in the numbers of the patients we have in the hospital?” At this point Fisher, apparently confused, asks Rudyk to clarify if she is suggesting the hospital release the total number of patients treated at the hospital “since the beginning of COVID,” which Rudyk says is an even better idea. “That’s better still, and that’s something that I can take to someone else, but I think those are important numbers. The patients that are still in the hospital, that are off the COVID floor, but still are occupying the hospital for a variety of reasons,” said Rudyk, before a male doctor interrupted to inform her that those patients are considered “recovered.”

      Still she persists: “I think that that needs to be highlighted as well, because once you’re off isolation you drop from the COVID numbers, that’s exactly right.” The male doctor agreed, “Carolyn, we can talk offline about how we run that up to marketing,” before being cut off by Rudyk. “So I just want to say we have to be more blunt, we have to be more forceful, we have to see something coming out: ‘If you don’t get vaccinated, you know you’re going to die,'” Rudyk said, laughing. “I mean let’s just be really blunt with these people.”

      https://archive.is/YqFsD [archive.is] https://twitter.com/i/status/1... [twitter.com]

  • by Growlley ( 6732614 ) on Saturday December 21, 2024 @06:28PM (#65031509)
    "America is suddenly getting healthier," they write. "No one knows why." You have stopped taking horse dewormer?
    • It was repurposed in the 1980s to a human drug. It wasn't "designed" as a horse dewormer, it was found to be helpful in those situation, then they tested in others and found it helpful there as well. You don't seem to understand that these drugs aren't designed, they are found. Then later, they are sometimes found to be helpful in other areas.

      Over the past decade, the global scientific community have begun to recognize the unmatched value of an extraordinary drug, ivermectin, that originates from a single microbe unearthed from soil in Japan. Work on ivermectin has seen its discoverer, Satoshi mura, of Tokyo’s prestigious Kitasato Institute, receive the 2014 Gairdner Global Health Award and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with a collaborating partner in the discovery and development of the drug, William Campbell of Merck & Co. Incorporated. Today, ivermectin is continuing to surprise and excite scientists, offering more and more promise to help improve global public health by treating a diverse range of diseases, with its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent being particularly extraordinary.

      The unique and extraordinary microorganism that produces the avermectins (from which ivermectin is derived) was discovered by mura in 1973 (Figure 1). It was sent to Merck laboratories to be run through a specialized screen for anthelmintics in 1974 and the avermectins were found and named in 1975. The safer and more effective derivative, ivermectin, was subsequently commercialized, entering the veterinary, agricultural and aquaculture markets in 1981. The drug’s potential in human health was confirmed a few years later and it was registered in 1987 and immediately provided free of charge (branded as Mectizan)—‘as much as needed for as long as needed’—with the goal of helping to control Onchocerciasis (also known as River Blindness) among poverty-stricken populations throughout the tropics. Uses of donated ivermectin to tackle other so-called ‘neglected tropical diseases’ soon followed, while commercially available products were introduced for the treatment of other human diseases.

      Perhaps more than any other drug, ivermectin is a drug for the world’s poor. For most of this century, some 250 million people have been taking it annually to combat two of the world’s most devastating, disfiguring, debilitating and stigma-inducing diseases, Onchocerciasis and Lymphatic filariasis. Most of the recipients live in remote, rural, desperately under-resourced communities in developing countries and have virtually no access to even the most rudimentary of medical interventions. Moreover, all the treatments have been made available free of charge thanks to the unprecedented drug donation program.

      https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It's because inflation made booze too expensive.

  • If this trend continues, perhaps we will rise closer to the top of the mid-pack and catch up with Estonia! As well we should, since we have the highest healthcare costs per capita in the world!

  • We were told during the election that the country was going down the toilet.

    Who would have thought drumpf was lying.

Heard that the next Space Shuttle is supposed to carry several Guernsey cows? It's gonna be the herd shot 'round the world.

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