Back

Life Expectancy in the United States Returns to PrePandemic Levels

Wetzler, H. P.

2025-06-02 public and global health
10.1101/2025.05.29.25327935 medRxiv
Show abstract

From 2019 to 2021, U.S. life expectancy at birth fell by roughly 2.45 years to the lowest level since 1996. Although life expectancy rose in 2022 and 2023, it did not fully return to its 2019 level. Now that 2024 death reports have stabilized, I constructed abridged life tables for 2019- 2024 using CDC WONDER Multiple Cause of Death mortality data and Census Bureau Vintage population estimates to assess recent trends. This is an update of a report posted on June 2, 2025. In 2024, life expectancy at birth climbed by nearly 0.6 years over 2023 to 79.12 years, while life expectancy at age 65 increased by approximately 0.2 years to 19.87 years. These 2024 gains have almost offset the declines experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, US mortality continues to exceed that in other high-income countries.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.