US life expectancy falls to 76.4 years, lowest in 26 years. They blame COVID and opioid ODs/ WaPo

But not so, since it fell in age groups like kids that had virtually no COVID deaths and no opioid deaths

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/12/22/us-life-expectancy-decline-2021-covid-fentanyl/

U.S. life expectancy continued its steady, alarming decline in 2021, as covid-19 and illegal drugs took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, according to final government data released Thursday.

Even as some peer nations began to bounce back from the toll of the pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped to 76.4 years at birth, down from 77 in 2020, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That means Americans can expect to live as long as they did in 1996 — a dismal benchmark for a reliable measure of health that should rise steadily in an affluent, developed nation. (In August, using preliminary data, the agency had pegged life expectancy in 2021 at 76.1 years.)

Notably, every age group in the U.S. — from young children to seniors 85 and older — saw a rise in its death rate. Men, women and most racial groups lost ground. In some previous years, even when overall life expectancy declined, some groups advanced…

The government reported last week that health care spending in 2021 reached nearly $13,000 per person…

The top ten causes of mortality remained the same except for flu and pneumonia, which dropped from the list as parts of the U.S. population wore masks to protect against the coronavirus. [How lame can the MSM get? COVID is killing more people, but masks are working so fewer people are getting COVID pneumonia? Or are they saying the masks protect against flu and pneumonia, but not COVID? Anything to avoid saying the vaccines are killing people—Nass]