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According to the Department of Health, life expectancy among New Yorkers dropped to 78 years between 2019 and 2020 because of the pandemic—a decrease of nearly five years. City officials are now ready to do something about that.
Earlier this week, Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner (DOHMH) Dr. Ashwin Vasan unveiled a new plan dubbed HealthyNYC that seeks to improve and extend the average lifespan of all city dwellers, specifically aiming to increase local life expectancy to 83 years of age by 2030.
To help us live longer, the campaign sets to tackle the very factors that generally contribute to premature deaths, including diet-related diseases, overdose, maternal mortality, violence, suicide, screenable cancers and COVID-19.
To that intent, some of the proposed plans include increasing access to healthy foods and promoting plant-forward diets, working on providing naloxone and entry into recovery centers to reduce overdose deaths, giving new families more opportunity to make use of quality health care and social support and expanding access to culturally responsive mental health care and social support services.
You can read through the full plan right here.
“‘HealthyNYC’ is a game changer because in the wake of COVID-19, and while facing parallel and growing health crises, we know that, as a city and a nation, people are getting sicker and dying sooner than they should,” said Dr. Vasan in an official statement. “Losing years of life and of good health is a unifying challenge, and getting them back is a top priority for New York City, as well as a north star for the future of public health. This announcement sets the coordinates for our collective mission to lead longer, healthier lives, and there is perhaps no more important measure of the health of our society and our democracy.”
We stand behind officials' work and hope that the new campaign will help us not only live longer lives but healthier ones as well.