By Randi Richardson

U.S. life expectancy jumped to 78.4 years last year, the highest it has been since 2019, before the pandemic.

A decline in Covid deaths was a primary factor in the upward trend. Covid fell from the fourth-leading cause of death in 2022 to the 10th in 2023.

Drug overdose deaths also decreased last year.

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%.

Kochanek noted, however, that the decrease in Covid deaths does not mean the virus's threat is gone.

"It's not going to disappear completely," he said, adding that it's not yet known whether deaths will continue to fall before leveling off at a more predictable annual rate.

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 injuries category includes drug overdoses, which are the leading cause of injury mortality in the U.S., according to the CDC. A second CDC report released Thursday found that drug overdose deaths decreased last year for the first time since 2018.

In 2023, the rate of overdose deaths was around 31.3 out of every 100,000 people, compared with 32.6 in 2022. Broken down by age, the largest decrease — more than 10% — was observed among people ages 15 to 24.

Overdose deaths involving opioids also fell last year, with a 17% decrease in deaths associated with the category that includes morphine, oxycodone and hydrocodone.

However, overdose deaths involving cocaine and psychostimulants like methamphetamine each rose slightly.

The CDC also analyzed death rates in the U.S. by race, ethnicity and gender and found that the declines were not even across groups.

Relative to white people, decreases were higher among most racial and ethnic minority groups, including Black, Asian and Hispanic people. Kochanek attributed that to changes in Covid death rates.

“A lot of those groups had higher mortality in the last few years because of Covid, so they’re starting at a higher plateau,” Kochanek said. “They have more room to drop.”

The most sizable drops in death rates were among Hispanic men and women — decreases of 10.5% and 8%, respectively — and in American Indian and Alaska Native people, whose rates fell 11.5% for women and 13.5% for men.

Of the broader upward trend in life expectancy, Kochanek said simply: "We can only hope that it continues."