Death rates dropped and life expectancy rose to the highest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released this month.
It found that life expectancy at birth rose to 78.4 years in 2023, nearly a full year more than the life expectancy of 77.5 years in 2022, the CDC said.
For males, it increased to 75.8 in 2023 from 74.8 in 2022.
Females' life expectancy also rose, increasing to 81.1 in 2023 from 80.2 in 2022.
"The increase we had this year — the 0.9 year — that's unheard of prior to the pandemic," Ken Kochanek, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics who co-authored the report, told NBC News.
"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."
During the pandemic years of 2019 to 2021, life expectancy fell from 78.8 to 76.4.
The death rate decreased 6%, from 798.8 deaths per 100,000 population in 2022 to 750.5 deaths in 2023, the report says.
Covid, as a leading cause of death, dropped to 10th place, with heart disease and cancer keeping their top spots.
More than 1.2 million deaths have been attributed to Covid, with the deaths peaking at more than 20,000 a week in January 2021.
