From a not-yet-peer-reviewed study:

An April 2022 study conducted by researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Colorado Boulder, and the Urban Institute, analyzed provisional government statistics that showed that overall U.S. life expectancy is now 76.6 years — the lowest figure in 25 years.

This drop comes after life expectancy plummeted from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 years in 2020, according to the researchers. The net loss of 2.26 years was the biggest one year fall since at least World War II, NPR reported…

It noted that even though the Black and Latino populations had bigger drops in life expectancy in 2020, this did not continue into 2021. Life expectancy among Latinos did not change significantly in 2021, and marginally went up in the Black population. In contrast, the life expectancy of white people, mostly men, declined slightly.

Snopes

We have heard about “deaths of despair” – suicide, drugs and alcohol – increasing among white men, so maybe this was the indirect effects of the pandemic coming home to roost.

Trends in life expectancy are a useful metric because they are a pretty objective measure of overall human wellbeing in society – encompassing some mix of physical and mental health, work life balance, child welfare, nutrition, environmental conditions like air quality, car accidents and other accidental deaths, etc. But individual life span is a very personal thing, as I try to convince my parents in their 70s. The fact that you are close to or over the average means you have already survived many things that are causing some people to die young and pull down the average.