Brian Laird on WNYc on WNYc. Last week Mayor Adams signed Healthy NYC

into law, codifying his goal of helping New Yorkers

live to at least 83 years old by 2030. This is an explicit life expectancy goal, 83 on average.

This comes after the city saw its average life expectancy drop to 78 in 2020 due to COVID-19.

It started to recover since then, but not all the way.

And it's not just COVID causing premature deaths, chronic illness and overdoses are sending many to an early grave, keeping life spans below pre-pandemic levels.

So we're going to talk about some of the numbers and of course it's different by different groups and we'll delve into the specifics of the healthy NYC plan and some other local public health news with the New York City Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner

Dr Ashwin Vassen.

Dr Vassen always good to have you on the program welcome back to WNYC.

Great to be back Brian.

Do you want to do a quick top-line statistical overview of life expectancy

among New York City residents? What was it? What is it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this plan comes out of this very basic realization that something's wrong when in the richest city, in the richest country, in the most, I guess,

ostensibly powerful nation in the world that our life expectancy is actually falling or flatlining and

nationally and that it's not keeping pace with our peer country. So that's a lot of

this comes out of this very American story of

stagnating life expectancy over the last decade. And then of course COVID hit and took a

uniquely damaging toll on New York. In 2020 alone, this city lost 4.6 years of life expectancy,

dropping from 82.6 years in 2019 to 78 years and those drops were more dramatic for black New Yorkers who not only experienced 5.5 years of life expectancy loss, but started at a lower baseline. Six years

dropped for Latino New Yorkers. And as you mentioned in your lead up, the causes are not just COVID related,

but you start to see other causes of death

moving in the wrong directions, like overdose,

suicide, chronic illnesses, widening black maternal mortality.

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