A soybean farmer in Mississippi County, Arkansas.
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If you were born in the South, chances are you have a shorter life expectancy compared to the rest of the United States, according to newly released data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thursday.
The findings, published by the National Vital Statistics Reports, examined state mortality and population estimates from 2018, as well as state-specific mortality and population figures for older Medicare beneficiaries in that year.
The CDC has found that Americans are expected to live 78.7 years with their birth, although women nationwide are more likely to survive five years, according to the report. States in the South fared worse than compared to their northeastern and western counterparts.
The CDC has found that West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, South Carolina and Missouri, according to the CDC, are among the ten largest states for life expectancy. West Virginia, which had a life expectancy of 74.4 years, was the lowest for men and women.
“With a few exceptions, the states with the largest gender differences are those with lower life expectancy at birth, while the smallest gender differences mostly occur in countries with higher life expectancy,” CDC researchers wrote in the report.
Meanwhile, Hawaii ranked first for the state with the highest life expectancy at 81 years. Aloha State has been followed by California, New York, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, New Jersey and Rhode Island to round out the ten best states where you will live the longest.
The CDC’s latest life expectancy figures come just a month after the agency published a preliminary report in February finding that life expectancy fell by a year during the pandemic in the first half of 2020 – the largest decline since World War II .
According to the report, the CDC predicted that life expectancy for Americans at birth in 2020 would be 77.8 years.
– Reuters contributed to this report.