Even as COVID raged, spikes in homicide were a significant drag on life expectancy for Black men

While the COVID-19 pandemic quickly reversed decades of progress in closing the gap between life expectancies for Black and white people in the United States, the disease's toll may have obscured the impact of another significant public health concern - a sharp increase in homicide rates - on the life expectancy of Black men, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 2019, Black men in the U.S. were expected to live an average of 71.4 years, 5 years less than white men. Just one year later, life expectancy for Black men had plummeted to 67.7 years, while white men fell just a year and a half. That opened the gap between the two groups to 7.2 years, far higher than the gap was even 20 years earlier (6.6 years in 2000).

"The pandemic period knocked out a huge amount of those gains in just one year's time," says Michael Light, a UW-Madison professor of sociology and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies whose research lies at the intersection of criminology and demography. "COVID played the larger role in that reversal - especially because it was initially more deadly among non-white people - but it was not the only important change going on. In 2020, we also saw the largest increase in homicide that we've ever recorded."

The difference between the homicide rates for Black men and white men, in particular, also erased a decades-long shift toward parity.

Homicide rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1980s and early '90s, then fell by more than half by 2014. They remained relatively stable until, from 2019 to 2020, homicides jumped up by 30%.

Black men fared worst among homicide victims, rising from 43.8 deaths per 100,000 men in 2019 to 61 per 100,000 in 2020. Over the same period, the rate of death by homicide for white men rose from 3.6 to 4.4 per 100,000.

According to an analysis published Aug. 21, 2024, in the journal PLOS ONEby Light and UW-Madison graduate student Karl Vachuska, the rising homicide rate was responsible for 26% of the increase in the life-expectancy gap between Black and white men from 2019 to 2021.

Compared to COVID-19, homicides carried extra weight in life-expectancy calculations, in which younger deaths pull harder on the averages. Light and Vachuska found that, in 2020, when racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths were most acute, homicides contributed more to Black-white inequality in life expectancy among men than any other cause of death, including COVID-19.

"COVID deaths were concentrated among older people," Light says. "But while homicide still represents a small proportion of overall deaths in the United States, it has a disproportionate impact on life expectancy because it's mostly killing young men."

When COVID-19 vaccines became available and public health measures more commonplace, homicide's influence on the Black-white life expectancy gap grew more pronounced. In 2021, homicide rates continued to rise, though not as fast as the 2020 jump. But the COVID-19 mortality imbalance between Black and white lives vanished.

"There was still a severe difference in life expectance between Black and white men in 2021," Light says. "That gap declined only slightly from 2020, even though the racial differences in COVID outcomes completely disappeared."

The new study's results show just how much sway murders can have on even broad measures of public health.

"While COVID was new and particularly devastating, it wasn't hard to look at the shifts in life expectancy and say, 'OK, when we get a handle on COVID, this will turn around,'" Light says. "But that does some minimizing of other important factors that need to be near the top of the list when we consider preventable deaths. That's important when we decide where public health resources should be placed."

The good news is the U.S. had already found success curbing homicides for decades pre-pandemic, and crime statistics for 2022 and 2023 show a renewed decline in homicide rates.

"Within our lifetime, within easy living memory, we achieved marked decreases in homicide and marked declines in racial disparities in homicide that had very real impacts on mortality inequality," Light says. "We know that emphasis on this problem can make a difference. What we learned about the pandemic period helps us understand just how significant those differences can be."

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