Life expectancy is actually increasing post-pandemic, CDC reveals — here’s how much

US average life expectancy has increased by slightly more than a year — another sign that America is slowly recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Life expectancy at birth was 77.5 years in 2022, rising by 1.1 years from 76.4 years in 2021, according to a report published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC defines life expectancy as the average number of years a person born in a specific year can expect to live. US life expectancy was 78.8 years in 2019. 

“We had this dip during the COVID-19 pandemic and we’re clawing our way back to the numbers we saw in 2019,” Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, told NBC News. 

The CDC attributes the slight rise in life expectancy in 2022 to a notable drop in coronavirus deaths and fewer deaths from cancer, heart disease, homicide and unintentional injuries.

These analysts said the increase could have been higher, if not for more deaths from pneumonia and the flu, malnutrition, kidney disease, birth defects, perinatal deaths and other causes.

“While we’re seeing fewer hits to life expectancy due to COVID, we’re seeing a peak in suicides,” Eric Goedereis, a professor at Webster University and a lifespan developmental psychologist, told Newsweek.

“We’re seeing increased deaths from drug overdoses. Those events are making it harder to bring life expectancy back to ‘pre-COVID’ numbers because even though we’re doing better managing the effects of COVID, we’re still seeing very difficult pulls on the data from other, non-normal events.”

US life expectancy estimates vary by sex and ethnicity.

Asian women boast the highest life expectancy, at 86.3 years, while American Indian and Alaskan men hold the lowest, at 64.6 years.

Other countries, such as France, Italy, and Sweden, have much higher life expectancies, which rebounded faster after the coronavirus crisis.

“To see an increase now in 2022 is great — we finally stopped the horrific worsening of mortality conditions in the United States,” Ryan Masters, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told NBC News.

“But it’s coming a year later than what other comparable countries experienced and it’s only marginally scratching the surface of improving mortality conditions for Americans.”