Legislative staff in Richmond released a first-of-its-kind report Wednesday morning. The report paints a grim picture for some populations and some regions of the Commonwealth.
The new Health Metrics Annual Report aims to describe trends in health conditions and healthcare accessibility across the state and try to understand what’s impacting health with the hope of finding new report topics and policies in the future.
And Wednesday’s premiere of the report showed a stark contrast: there’s a 25-year difference in life expectancy depending on where you live in Virginia, with Manassas Park at the high end and Petersburg at the bottom.
“In short, the metrics in the past 5 years shows the average life expectancy has decreased since 2017 and there are several factors that influence this,” report analyst Khadeejat Lawal told the Joint Commission on Health Care Wednesday.
The factors include the COVID-19 outbreak that killed over 23,000 Virginians between 2020 and 2023, and a spike in drug overdose deaths during the same period, though that has now dropped below pre-pandemic levels. Still, geographic data provided this bit of insight:
“For localities with the lowest life expectancy in 2022, average life expectancy declined more than twice the rate it did for the higher ranked localities this period,” Lawl said.
That means if you were already in a lower expectancy region of the state, things got worse.
Caroline County Republican Delegate Robert Orrock said he’d likely use the data from districts with longer life expectancies to learn lessons for those with less.
“When we start mining into ‘here are the successes,’ [like] Lexington, what are they doing out there that increased life expectancy by four years?” Orrock said. “That, I think, will give us the most data so we can start crafting public policy around.”
Urbana Republican Delegate Keith Hodges pointed to diabetes reporting data which Lawal said was also on the rise.
“Some of the screening guidelines have changed in the last few years, going from age 35 to 45,” he said. “You’ll see a spike there when you increase those routine screenings.”
Lawl said some of the data could have been influenced by increased screening, specifically hypertension which was also found to increase in recent years.
Democratic Delegate Cia Price pressed the relevance of social and political determinants of health.
“It’s not always biology that some of these things are happening,” Price said. “If you live near a coal plant, you have increased asthma," she said.
“For hundreds of years decisions have been made that have negatively impacted certain people,” she added, suggesting future legislation should be done through the lens of equity.
“Petersburg did not just end up at 64.3 years,” she said, referencing report data. “Maybe Manassas Park doesn’t need the same things Petersburg needs and maybe it's not a bad work to look at equity when making legislation.”
No votes on future studies or legislation were taken, but bills for the 2026 Legislative Session should start rolling in come late December.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
