The life expectancy of a person born in New Jersey dropped by 2.6 years from 2019 to 2020, a new study shows. The drop is being attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic and a worsening crisis of drug overdoses.
The life expectancy for New Jerseyans is now 77.5 years, down from 80.1 years pre-pandemic.
New Jersey wasn’t the only state to drop in life expectancy; in fact, all 50 states and Washington, D.C. say a decline in life expectancy. Across the country, life expectancy dropped by an average of 1.8 years. Leading the U.S. in loss of longevity was New York, whose residents’ life expectancy dropped by a full 3 years, down to 77.7 years.
The CDC said the grim statistics are the largest year-to-year drop in average life expectancy in 75 years. The last such drop was only seen during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of young men were killed fighting the Axis of Evil.
As of 2020, from which the results of this study were taken, Hawaii had the longest average life expectancy at 80.7 years, while Mississippi had the lowest, at 71.9 years.
