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U.S. population growth dipped to its lowest rate since the nation’s founding during the first year of the pandemic as the coronavirus curtailed immigration, delayed pregnancies and killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents, according to figures released Tuesday. The United States grew by only 0.1%, with an additional 392,665 added to the U.S. population from July 2020 to July 2021, bringing the nation’s count to 331.8 million people, according to population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau. (Schneider, 12/21)

U.S. health officials say 2021 is shaping up to be even deadlier than last year. It’s too early to say for sure, since all the death reports for November and December won’t be in for many weeks. But based on available information, it seems likely 2021 will surpass last year’s record number of deaths by at least 15,000, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death statistics. Last year was the most lethal in U.S. history, due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. A CDC report being released Wednesday shows 2020 was actually even worse than the agency previously reported. (Stobbe, 12/22)

Death rates for Americans ages 15 and older rose sharply in 2020, hitting Black and Hispanic Americans the hardest, according to a report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report — the agency’s finalized data on 2020 death rates — confirmed that life expectancy in the United States fell last year by nearly two years, the largest one-year drop since World War II. (Sullivan, 12/22)

COVID-19 helped erase 1.8 years from the average American’s life expectancy in 2020, according to the latest federal mortality data released Wednesday, marking the greatest change in the American lifespan since World War II. During that one brutal year, COVID-19 became the third-most common cause of death in the United States, with one out of 10 fatalities due to the virus. “A loss of two years seems limited, but that’s rolling back decades and decades of progress,” said Dr. Zinzi Diana Bailey, a social epidemiologist at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. “We are going backwards.” (Santhanam, 12/22)