The novel coronavirus constituted the country’s third leading cause of death in 2020, according to preliminary data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter movement also killed us in extraordinary numbers. In fact, they disproportionately victimized the groups they were intended to protect.
Overall life expectancy in the United States fell by one and a half years to 77.3 years. Last year alone erased over a decade of medical progress, and it did so unequally. Whereas a white woman’s life expectancy only fell by 1.1 years, the average black man lost three years and can no longer expect to live past his 60s.
Going forward, our notional average black man will not have his life cut short by COVID, for now, we have a pandemic-ending vaccine. But his average life span is shorter nonetheless due to overdoses and the sharp spike in violent crime.
COVID, unsurprisingly, accounted for three-quarters of the decline in life expectancy. But interestingly, it only caused only 59% of the decline in black life expectancy. Intentional injuries (mostly drug overdose deaths, which increased 30% overall last year), heart disease, and diabetes were responsible for more than 20% — all problems that were exacerbated by lockdowns.
Homicides, meanwhile, accounted for 8% of the decrease in life expectancy for black Americans and even more for black men. Citing crime scholar Richard Rosenfeld and NYPD official Michael LiPetri, a Wall Street Journal report on the staggering increase in crime notes that the urban homicide crisis “may have been made worse because police were drawn away from violent neighborhoods to city centers to monitor protests against policing and, in some cases, to respond to rioting and looting.”
Put another way, while the exceedingly educated, privileged, and mostly white activist class bullied cities into defunding police and forced them to focus on antifa rioting and mayhem, actual black lives were cut short as a result. If that doesn’t encapsulate the grotesque irony of virtue-signaling, I don’t know what could.
COVID came and devastated not just the more than 600,000 lives in the U.S. it ended directly, but also the families and friends still reeling from their losses. But while we can vaccinate away the virus, it won’t be so easy to get rid of the other lethal factors, the law enforcement vacuum of the 2020 riots or the social isolation of lockdowns, so long as government officials cling to their pandemic-era powers.
