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. 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." Michael Light, Professor, University of Wisconsin–Madison His research lies at the intersection of criminology and demography. 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 u.