Recently, National Public Radio (NPR) in the US published a story titled 'Live free and die? The sad state of US life expectancy' that explored the great divide between the United States and peer countries on life expectancy.

While most countries experienced a dip during the Covid-19 pandemic and rebounded after vaccines and other treatments were rolled out, American life expectancy has essentially fallen off a cliff and never came back.

The graph published by NPR is shocking. It shows that US life expectancy is lower than in Cuba or Lebanon. The number has been known since just before Christmas when health officials announced that the country's life expectancy had dropped starkly for a second year in a row to 76 years.

However, last week more bad news arrived after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that maternal mortality in the country reached a high in 2021. And another paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found rising mortality rates among US children and adolescents. This means you can't blame Covid-19 exclusively for the drop in life expectancy and assume it'll jump right back up as soon as the pandemic is finally dealt with.

The rate of maternal deaths in 2021 was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, which is more than ten times higher than some other high-income countries, including Australia, Austria, Israel, Japan and Spain which all had rates between 2 and 3 deaths per 100,000 in 2020.