Or, at least, life expectancy is! The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measures this every year and publishes a report. Their latest report said that Americans could expect to live 78.6 years at birth in 2017, down a tenth of a year from the 2016 estimate. Men could anticipate a life span of 76.1 years, down a tenth of a year from 2016. Life expectancy for women in 2017 was 81.1 years, unchanged from the previous year.
The data continued the longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918. That four-year period included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in the United States and perhaps 50 million worldwide.
A good part of the problem is death from drug overdoses. They set another annual record in 2017, cresting at 70,237 — up from 63,632 the year before. The opioid epidemic continued to take a relentless toll, with 47,600 deaths in 2017 from drugs sold on the street such as fentanyl and heroin, as well as prescription narcotics. That was also a record number, driven largely by an increase in fentanyl deaths. Since 1999, the number of drug overdose deaths has more than quadrupled. Deaths attributed to opioids were nearly six times greater in 2017 than they were in 1999.
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