TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — When it comes to mortality, Florida residents can now expect their lifelines to run just a little bit shorter. New data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vital Statistics Report said the whole country will die sooner, including in Florida.
The CDC’s report said the state with the highest life expectancy in the country was Hawaii, where residents can expect to live as long as 80.7 years. Mississippi was the lowest life expectancy, at 71.9 years. For the Sunshine State, residents of Florida are looking at 77.5 years, down from 79 in 2019.
Based on the CDC data, Florida ranks 19th for life expectancy. Males in Florida have less time to live than their female counterparts, with 74.6 years compared to 80.5 years. The trend of women in all 50 states and the District of Columbia held, with women living longer across the whole country, no matter where they make their homes.
Across the various states, Florida proved an outlier when it came to average life expectancies, the only southern state with a life expectancy around 77, rather than the range of about 72 to 76.8 from North Carolina to New Mexico.
Nationally, the life expectancy fell by 1.8 years, “mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic and increases in unintentional injuries.” The CDC reported the unintentional injuries were “mainly drug overdose deaths.” In May, President Joe Biden marked an occasion for the deaths of one million Americans to COVID.
Midwestern states had similar life expectancies to southern states, as well as Northeast non-coastal areas. The CDC said “states with the lowest life expectancies at age 65 are mostly concentrated in the South, with Florida being a noted exception, and those with the highest life expectancies are mostly in the West and Northeast.”
When it comes to survival beyond age 65, Florida ranks higher, at No. 6. The average life expectancy beyond 65 in Florida is about 19.2 years, with men expected to survive to just about 83-years-old while women could make it to nearly 86-years-old, according to the federal data for 2020.
Every part of the country had decreases in average life expectancy from birth between 2019 and 2020. New York had the biggest drop, going down three years to 77.7 years from 80.7. The lowest drop was in Hawaii, where the average life expectancy only went down by 0.2 years.
The U.S. Census Bureau said from 2019 to 2020, the number of deaths in America increased by 19%, which the bureau calls the “largest spike in mortality in 100 years.” Deaths in 2021 were reportedly still elevated as the COVID-19 pandemic continued.
The Florida Department of Health reported the two leading causes of death in the state were heart disease and cancer, though COVID-19 was the third highest.
| Cause of Death | Number in 2020 |
|---|---|
| Heart Disease | 49,208 |
| Cancer | 45,723 |
| COVID-19 | 19,157 |
| Unintentional Injury | 15,987 |
| Stroke | 15,356 |