Everything Got Worse During COVID
Last week, Reason‘s Billy Binion reported on some undersung good news: American murder rates are falling fast. This year could end up being the least violent year on record.
This is, of course, a welcome development by itself. It’s an especially laudatory trend, coming as it does on the heels of a massive murder spike during the pandemic, when homicides rose by 30 percent in the average U.S. city.
The COVID crime wave is well understood by now. The all-cause rise in mortality during the pandemic is a little less appreciated. No matter how you slice it, America during COVID was a sicker, deadlier, more dangerous, and generally more dysfunctional place.
Between 2019 and 2021, drug overdose went up some 55 percent and traffic fatalities rose 20 percent.
These fatalities, alongside an estimated 1.2 million COVID deaths, helped push the country’s death rate from 723.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019 to a high of 879.7 in 2021.Â
Remarkably, only suicides seemed to have resisted the rising death trend, falling in 2020 before rising slightly above pre-pandemic levels in 2021.
Mercifully, murders, traffic deaths, and overdoses are now all falling from their pandemic-era highs. (Suicides continue
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