As the coronavirus descended upon the world, the United States swiftly emerged as a tragic outlier among its peers, beset by more sickness and more death. It became clear that past was very much prologue: The increasing burden of chronic disease had made the nation especially vulnerable to a novel virus, and the health cataclysm that arrived in 2020 accelerated the backward march of life spans. That led The Washington Post to explore – through rigorous data analysis and exhaustive on-the-ground reporting – how the United States arrived at such a fraught moment.
Declining life expectancy was hardly a secret. For more than a decade, The Post and other news organizations had written about rising death rates among the middle-aged that were linked to opioid overdoses and “deaths of despair.” But that was only part of the story – and, it turned out, not even the main part.
In fall 2022, Post journalists convened to explore how we could examine declining life spans in the United States. During the following year, Post journalists traveled to 10 states, two other continents and into the homes of families sundered by the loss of lives ended too early.
Our project established that the crisis is not intermittent, or transient, or the result of narrow circumstances that might be easily reversed. Instead, The Post’s analysis conclusively demonstrates that the crisis results from deeply embedded causes showing little evidence of receding. The examination revealed how decades of government policy and corporate influence conspired to create the problem and continue to exacerbate it.
Built on a foundation of revelatory data findings, the resulting stories, graphics, videos and podcasts showed that the reversal in life expectancy is deeper and broader than previously reported and an exception among peer nations.
We introduced readers to families hollowed out by chronic disease and to people whose lives are permanently compromised by heart disease, obesity and liver ailments. We exposed the life-and-death consequences of politics and policy, and showed how a disease once regarded as the province of the aged is afflicting a staggering number of children and young adults. We went to school cafeterias where the arrival of Lunchables marked the sway of industry. Through words and animated illustrations, we demonstrated the enduring ramifications of stress. And we traveled to Portugal for a glimpse of what could be as we seek solutions to this American anomaly. The result was Dying Early: America’s life expectancy crisis. The response from readers was immediate and profound as they shared their own accounts of illness and encounters with a fractured health-care system
