Issue Category: Infectious Disease

COVID-19 and Drug Overdose Deaths Drive U.S. Life Expectancy Down

(Washington, DC – January 17, 2023) — Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December 2022 showed that U.S. life expectancy decreased from 77 years in 2020 to 76.4 years in 2021, the second consecutive year that U.S. life expectancy decreased. The last time the U.S. experienced a two-year decrease in life expectancy was during World War II.

Age-specific death rates from 2020 to 2021 increased for all age groups other than infants less than one year old. American Indian and Alaska Native females experienced the largest increase in death rates, jumping 7.3 percent in 2021. Lower life expectancy for some populations groups, disproportionately among people of color, have been attributed to the structural inequities and barriers to optimal health that those communities experience.

Heart disease remained the leading cause of death in the U.S. during 2021 followed by cancer and COVID-19. In addition, drug overdose accounted for over a third of all unintentional deaths. During 2021, 106,699 people died in the U.S. due to a drug overdose, a 14 percent increase in the overdose death rate over 2020.

“These data underscore the importance of TFAH’s work to advance public health, prevention, and health equity,” said TFAH President and CEO J. Nadine Gracia, MD, MSCE. “The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the impact of social and economic conditions on people’s health and a community’s ability to be resilient during an emergency. TFAH will remain steadfast in advocating for policies that promote optimal health and well-being for every person and community. Among our priorities are supporting policies and programs that will strengthen the nation’s public health workforce and data systems; investment in substance misuse and suicide prevention including school-based mental health services and primary prevention programs; increased investments in chronic disease prevention programs including obesity prevention; and addressing the social determinants of health.”

Learn more about the causes of declining U.S. life expectancy in this TFAH issue brief: U.S. Experienced Steepest Two-year Decline in Life Expectancy in a Century – TFAH

For more on TFAH’s recommendations to improve the nation’s emergency preparedness: Ready or Not 2022: Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism – TFAH

For more on TFAH’s recommendations on needed investments in the nation’s public health system: The Impact of Chronic Underfunding on America’s Public Health System: Trends, Risks, and Recommendations, 2022 – TFAH

For more on TFAH’s recommendations on addressing the nation’s drug, alcohol and suicide crisis: Pain in the Nation 2022: U.S. Experienced Highest Ever Combined Rates of Deaths Due to Alcohol, Drugs, and Suicide During the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic – TFAH

For more on TFAH’s recommendations to address the nation’s obesity crisis: State of Obesity 2022: Better Policies for a Healthier America – TFAH

TFAH’s Portal of COVID-19 Resources

The following is a list of TFAH resources and documents related to the novel coronavirus read of COVID-19 and better equip the nation’s public health system to deal with this and future health emergencies.

Press Releases and Statements

20 Public Health Organizations Condemn Herd Immunity Scheme for Controlling Spread of SARS-CoV-2   The virus that causes COVID-19 has infected at least 7.8 million people in the United States and 38 million worldwide. It has led to over 215,000 deaths domestically, and more than 1 million globally – with deaths continuing to climb… read more (October 14, 2020)

Newly Announced Order for Hospitals to Bypass CDC and Send Coronavirus Patient Information Directly to Washington Database Likely to Worsen Pandemic Response Rather than Improve It  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as the nation’s lead public health agency, is uniquely qualified to collect, analyze and disseminate information regarding infectious diseases… read more (July 16, 2020)

Nearly 350 Public Health Organizations Implore HHS Secretary Azar to Support CDC’s Critical Role in the COVID-19 Pandemic Response  The expertise of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and all public health agencies is critical to protecting Americans’ health during the COVID-19 crisis, said a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar from 347 health and public health organizations released today… read more (July 7, 2020)

Public Health Needs Our Support “As our nation’s struggles to manage the continued surge of COVID-19 cases, we need to strengthen the public health response… read more (June 23, 2020)

Summary of CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on COVID-19 Impact Patterns This is the first data reported on U.S. patients and is consistent with findings from other countries. Key takeaways… read more (March 31, 2020)

Trust for America’s Health Statement in Response to Congressional Passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (“CARES Act”)
“Congress took an important step today to begin giving public health the resources it needs now to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are seeing in real-time the impact of the chipping away at public health budgets over the past 15 years… read more (March 27, 2020)

Cross-Sector Group of Eighty-eight Organizations Calls on Congress to Address Americans’ Mental Health and Substance Misuse Treatment Needs as Part of COVID-19 Response
A cross-sector group of 88 organizations from the mental health and substance misuse, public health and patient-advocacy sectors are jointly calling on the Trump Administration and Congress to address the immediate and long term mental health and substance misuse treatment needs of all Americans as part of their COVID-19 response… read more (March 20, 2020)

55 Organizations Call for Passage and Fast Implementation of Paid Sick Leave for all Workers as a Critical Part of COVID-19 Response
A cross-sector group of 55 public health, health, labor, business, and social policy organizations are jointly calling on the Trump Administration and Congress to pass and quickly implement a federal paid sick leave law that provides 14 days of such leave to all workers, available immediately… read more (March 13, 2020)

TFAH Applauds Passage of Supplemental Funding for COVID-19 Response: Now Funding Must Move Quickly to States and Other Entities
TFAH applauds Congress’ fast action in approving the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act (H.R 6074). We now call on the tasked federal agencies to move quickly to send the appropriated monies to the agencies and localities working at the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis… read more (March 5, 2020)

TFAH Statement on COVID-19 Preparations
Now that the U.S. has transitioned from the planning phase to the response phase of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Federal Executive Branch and Congress as well as state and local governments and other stakeholders should prioritize… read more (March 3, 2020)

Congressional Testimony and Sign-on Letters

Commentaries and Op-Eds

Additional News Coverage We Recommend

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count

as compiled by the New York Times

 

 

CDC COVID-19 Information Resources

COVID-19 and Response: Webinars and Briefings

Related Reports

TFAH Recognizes National Minority Health Month

Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) is proud to support National Minority Health Month (NMHM) 2022 and its critical focus on addressing health inequities. This year’s NMHM theme Give Your Community a Boost! notes the importance of ensuring that everyone eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine is vaccinated, including all eligible booster doses. Being vaccinated is the best way to protect yourself and your loved ones against severe illness from COVID-19.

“Ensuring that communities of color have equitable access to and reliable sources of information about the COVID-19 vaccine is vital to promoting and protecting the health and well-being of the community,” said TFAH President and CEO, Dr. J. Nadine Gracia. “People of color have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, due to longstanding social, economic, and health inequities that led to higher rates of job loss, less access to essential resources for remote learning, and higher rates of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. We need to focus on two priorities: protecting everyone from COVID-19 now and ensuring that no community is at heightened risk during the next public health emergency. ”

Additional Readings:

TFAH’s 2020 policy brief Building Trust in and Access to a COVID-19 Vaccine Within Communities of Color and Tribal Nations reports on challenges to building vaccine trust and access in communities of color and tribal communities and recommends solutions.

TFAH’s 2022 Ready or Not: Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism reports on state-level public health emergency readiness and the connection between health equity and emergency preparedness.

TFAH’s Leveraging Evidence-Based Policies to Improve Health, Control Costs, and Create Health Equity recommends policy action that if adopted will address the social determinants of health that currently drive poor health in many communities.

Read more about TFAH’s policy recommendations to rebuild the nation’s public health system and invest in the social determinants of health and health equity in our Blueprint report: The Promise of Good Health for All: Transforming Public Health in America. A Blueprint for the 2021 Administration and Congress.

Congressional Briefing and National Webinar: Ready or Not 2022: Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism

As the nation enters its third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s report calls for urgent investment to create a public health system able to protect all Americans’ health during emergencies. The report measures states’ degree of preparedness to respond to a wide spectrum of health emergencies and to provide ongoing public health services.

A panel of subject matter experts discussed the nation’s readiness for public health emergencies, examined the findings of the report, and discussed key recommendations for policymakers.

Resources:

Trust for America’s Health

Office of Minority Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Articles shared by Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA

The Challenge of Vaccine Hesitancy Didn’t Start with COVID-19, and it Won’t End There

Will COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation Lead to More Measles, Flu and Shingles?

Cecelia Thomas, JD

Just over one year has passed since the first availability of the COVID-19 vaccine. At this one-year mark 63 percent of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated. This ranks the United States as 60th in the world based on the percentage of fully vaccinated individuals. To say that these rates are troubling is an understatement. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy, the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines, as one of the top ten threats to global health. The consequences of this threat are tragically apparent with the deaths of mostly unvaccinated Americans. High levels of vaccine hesitancy have slowed the world’s ability to move past the pandemic and may be what’s allowed new variants of the virus to emerge.  Without addressing the root causes of vaccine hesitancy, more preventable infectious disease outbreaks will occur, and they will cost thousands of more lives in addition to further social and economic disruption.

Reasons for Vaccine Hesitancy
The problem of vaccine hesitancy did not start with COVID-19 and it likely won’t end there. In communities of color, vaccine hesitancy stems from long-standing health disparities and medical mistreatment . These deep and painful roots in this country’s history are exacerbated by the persistence of racial discrimination and bias in healthcare today and by practical barriers to vaccination such as health coverage limitations, inadequate transportation, and insufficient paid time off. While communities of color and low-income communities have had the most pervasive vaccine hesitancy historically, these groups are far from the only groups driving current vaccine hesitancy.

Efforts to rectify these past and present injustices should focus on cultural competence training for medical providers and community leaders on issues related to COVID-19 and routine vaccinations for children and adults. In addition, we need to improve vaccine accessibility and transparency. Other groups, other than populations that are systematically marginalized, such as white Evangelical Christians, have also expressed high rates of vaccine hesitancy before and throughout the pandemic. The politicization of public health that occurred during the last election intensified anti-vaccine sentiments, while social media and other platforms have allowed for the increased spread of misinformation.

Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy through Policy
Congress has recently passed legislation to fund fortified public health infrastructure to conduct and support widespread outreach, engagement, and vaccinations to communities across the nation. In addition, the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force served as a forum for experts in the field to comprehensively address disparities in pandemic-related inequalities and develop solutions to issues such as vaccine accessibility and hesitancy. These are crucial steps at the federal level. States should follow suit with steps to bolster vaccination access and education.  Vaccine mandate bans are a step in the wrong direction and bad public policy.

Long-term Impacts of Vaccine Hesitancy
The U.S. also remains vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases such as flu, hepatitis B, pneumococcal, and shingles, due to under-vaccination. The threat of increased hesitance could further endanger people at higher risk for severe outcomes including older adults and people with underlying health conditions.  A year before the pandemic, the U.S. was in the midst of its worst measles outbreak in two decades and just narrowly preserved its measles elimination status.  The seasonal flu vaccine has also remained significantly underutilized in recent years. The lowest flu vaccination rate in recent years,  42% during the 2017-2018 flu season, contributed to 2017-2018 being the deadliest flu season in 40 years with 80,000 deaths. Despite this tragic reality check, the flu vaccination rate has yet to increase past 49% . If vaccination rates for diseases such as the seasonal flu do not improve, the combined burden of these infectious diseases will further strain the healthcare system and cause needless death and illness. There has also been a significant drop in routine vaccination rates across all ages due to the pandemic.  Adult vaccination rates are already far below Healthy People 2030 goals pre-pandemic and an estimated 26 million doses for adults and adolescents were missed in 2020.

Looking Forward
Congress, the Biden Administration and public health advocates must continue to work on immunization catch-up and support efforts to maintain high immunization coverage rates. These efforts are especially critical for the communities most impacted by COVID-19, such as communities of color and children. In October 2020, Trust for America’s Health co-hosted a national convening on building vaccine confidence and ensuring equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccine in communities of color, in partnership with the National Medical Association and UnidosUS. The policy recommendations of this report apply to other groups with growing rates of vaccine hesitancy, such as people who identify as politically conservative. Recommendations from the resulting policy brief also extend beyond the COVID-19 vaccine:

  • Expanding federal funding to support and strengthen national, state, local, Tribal and territorial work on equitable and effective vaccination planning, communications, distribution and administration, including funding to support vaccine distribution at the local level and by community-based organizations;
  • Collaborating with trusted community messengers/leaders for vaccine administration and education;
  • Creating culturally and linguistically appropriate vaccine education;
  • Ensuring zero out-of-pocket costs for individuals receiving recommended vaccines; and
  • Collecting complete disaggregated racial and ethnic data on adverse experiences in healthcare as well as health outcomes.

While these recommendations are most immediately applicable to the COVID-19 pandemic, they will also be important to increasing vaccine trust in the future.  These methods have already begun to work, vaccine hesitancy and racial gaps in vaccinations are beginning to slowly decrease. We must build on this momentum and prioritize increasing vaccine confidence across the U.S. to ensure that the nation is better prepared for future public health crises.

Cecelia Thomas, JD, is a Senior Government Relations Manager at Trust for America’s Health

 

TFAH Applauds Introduction of the Protecting the Health of America’s Older Adults Act

(Washington, DC – December 16) – Trust for America’s Health, a non-partisan, nonprofit public health policy, research and advocacy organization, applauds the introduction of the bipartisan Protecting the Health of America’s Older Adults Act by Representatives Lois Frankel (CA-44), Gus Bilirakis (FL-12) and Debbie Dingell (MI-12). The bill would enable state and local public health departments to better meet the needs of older adults via innovative new strategies.

If enacted, the bill would create a Healthy Aging grant program at CDC to provide grants to health departments to help states and local communities coordinate multi-sector efforts to promote the health of older adults and develop aging expertise. The grant program would allow state and local health departments to apply an aging lens to all of their work, including efforts to reduce healthcare costs and improve health equity. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of public health’s role in the aging sector, and this new program will help ensure that health departments have the resources they need to make a meaningful impact for seniors.

The President and CEO of Trust for America’s Health, Dr. J. Nadine Gracia, congratulates Representatives Frankel, Bilirakis, and Dingell on the introduction of the bill, stating:

“The last year underscored how important it is for public health to be at the table when it comes to promoting the health of older adults. Health departments have been critical to addressing the needs of older adults during the pandemic; their active engagement in many other issues faced by the aging population, including transportation and housing access, chronic disease, and mental health, will promote better aging outcomes and benefit our entire society. This new grant program would be a step in the right direction to ensure that state and local health departments have the resources to do exactly that.”

In addition to TFAH, original endorsing organizations include:

  • Alliance for Aging Research
  • American Association on Health and Disability
  • American Lung Association
  • American Muslim Health Professionals
  • American Public Health Association
  • American Psychological Association
  • Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health
  • Association of State Public Health Nutritionists
  • Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
  • Authority Health
  • Catholic Health Association of the United States
  • Center for Advocacy for the Rights and Interests of the Elderly (CARIE)
  • Ceres Community Project
  • Christian Council of Delmarva
  • Coalition of National Health Education Organizations
  • Common Threads
  • Elder Options
  • Equality California
  • FLIPANY
  • Florida Public Health Association
  • The Gerontological Society of America
  • Hartsfield Health Systems Consulting, LLC
  • Lakeshore Foundation
  • Long Beach Gray Panthers
  • Maine Council on Aging
  • Maine Public Health Association
  • Mel Leaman Free Clinic
  • MindWise Innovations
  • National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services Programs
  • National Network of Public Health Institutes
  • National Recreation and Park Association
  • National Senior Games Association
  • Peggy Lillis Foundation
  • The Praxis Project
  • Prevent Blindness
  • Silver State Equality-Nevada
  • Society for Public Health Education
  • Society for Women’s Health Research
  • Tennessee Justice Center
  • Urban Health Partnerships
  • Valley AIDS Council
  • WARM, Inc.
  • Washington State Public Health Association
  • We All Rise

TFAH has prepared a fact sheet on the legislation.

 

Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust Applaud the Surgeon General’s Advisory on Youth Mental Health

The challenges to our children’s mental health were many before COVID-19 and made worse by the pandemic – immediate action is needed

(December 7, 2021) – Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust strongly applaud U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s Advisory on Youth Mental Health released today.

“We applaud the Surgeon General for not only drawing more attention to the issue of youth mental health, but reminding us that this problem, significant before COVID-19, has been negatively impacted during, and could only get worse after the pandemic without robust action,” said Benjamin F. Miller, PsyD, President of Well Being Trust.  “By proactively addressing mental health, including bringing care to where people are, we are more likely to meet the moment in a way that can help countless young people and their families.”

The Surgeon General’s advisory calls for “a swift and coordinated response” to the nation’s youth mental health crisis and demonstrates the need for all sectors of society to be part of the solution with recommendations for what individuals, families, community organizations, technology companies and government can do to improve and protect young people’s mental health.

“One of the strengths of this advisory is that it recognizes that in order to support young people’s mental health we need to address the social and economic conditions in their lives with multisector initiatives, said J. Nadine Gracia, M.D., MSCE, President and CEO of Trust for America’s Health. “Where a child lives, where they go to school, their family’s access to employment and safe housing all impact their mental health.”

TFAH and WBT’s Pain in the Nation series has tracked the nation’s deaths of despair since 2017 including the escalating youth mental health crisis. Its report Addressing a Crisis: Cross-Sector Strategies to Prevent Adolescent Substance Use and Suicide. makes recommendations for cross sector action.

 

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Trust for America’s Health is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes optimal health for every person and community and makes the prevention of illness and injury a national priority. Twitter: @HealthyAmerica1

Well Being Trust is a national foundation dedicated to advancing the mental, social, and spiritual health of the nation. Created to include participation from organizations across sectors and perspectives, Well Being Trust is committed to innovating and addressing the most critical mental health challenges facing America, and to transforming individual and community well-being. www.wellbeingtrust.org. Twitter: @WellBeingTrust