By Steve Sailer
10/29/2021
From a CDC release:
This is why the 30 percent increase in the U.S. homicide rate during 2020 is so remarkable. The increase itself was not unexpected — after all, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report had documented a similar increase just days before NCHS released its provisional quarterly estimates on October 6. But the 30 percent jump in homicide in 2020 was the biggest one-year increase in over a century, with the lone bigger increase coming way back in 1905, essentially a statistical blip that was likely the result of changes to the national death registry at a time when the National Vital Statistics System was first being constructed.
Prior to 2020, the biggest increase in the national homicide rate came in 2001, the year of the September 11 attacks, when the rate increased 20 percent.
The new data on homicide show there was a wide difference in the 2020 rates based on geography. The states with the highest homicide rates were: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Maryland. The District of Columbia had a higher homicide rate than any state. The states with the biggest rate increase in 2020 were Montana, South Dakota, Delaware and Kentucky, while only two states, Alaska and Maine, had definitive declines in homicide rates.
… So the FBI data is a system where the FBI asks law enforcement agencies across the country to report certain types of information. Homicides are part of that. It’s a voluntary system, not all law enforcement agencies report. The vital statistics data, of course, is coming from the death certificate. Death certificates have to be filed for every death that occurs in the United States, so vital statistics data are more complete than the data that come out in the Uniform Crime Report. That said, the trends match pretty closely between the UCR and the vital statistics data so you know when we see something come out in the UCR — like a big increase like we saw with homicide, — there’s a good bet that the vital statistics data will show that as well. And that’s indeed what we’ve seen.
So the CDC is even slower to sum up homicides than the FBI. But there are some good reasons for it: putting the word “homicide” on a death certificate is a big deal that requires the government to follow up, so being quite certain the cause of death was homicide encourages caution rather than snap judgment.
Homicide is one of 21 leading causes of death that are included in the quarterly provisional data release that posted this week. The new numbers are featured on a data visualization dashboard on the NCHS web site. Some of the significant findings include:
A nearly 17% increase from 2019 to 2020 in death rates from accidents or unintentional injuries.
E.g., car crashes.
Death rates from Diabetes also increased nearly 17%, from the one year period ending in March 2020 to the same point in 2021.
We have had no end of national crusades lately: masks, fight racism, etc. What with the correlation between fatness and Covid severity, shouldn’t one of them have been to make people less diabetic by exercising more and eating less?
Hypertension mortality increased nearly 16% in the one-year period ending in Quarter 1 2021.
And death rates from Influenza/Pneumonia dropped 17% during this period.
In other news, this week NCHS also released a report on mortality and marital status in the United States. The report focused on adults age 25 and up, covering the period 2010 though 2019. The study found that death rates for married adults during roughly the last decade have declined by more than three times that of never-married or divorced adults. Suicide was found to be among the ten leading causes of death for never-married and divorced people, but not among the leading killers for married or widowed people. Cancer is the number one cause of death for married adults whereas heart disease is the leading killer for unmarried adults.
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