Early death

Life expectancy at birth summarizes the death rates of a place at every age in one number, and it does not say which causes ended the lives it counts. The causes of early death each have a geography of their own, and the sources that record them cover places unevenly. CDC publishes some death rates for clusters of neighboring tracts, CDC WONDER withholds small county counts, and a modeled CDC panel also covers the counties that WONDER leaves blank. This part moves between the summary and the causes, and each chapter names the source and the places it can use. How the withholding biases a comparison is the subject of Chapter 10.3, Suppressed counties in death data.

Chapter 8.1, Gun homicide and the causes of early death finds firearm homicide deaths concentrated in the tract clusters with the highest rates, and in Cook County the residents of those clusters have a shorter life expectancy than residents of clusters with no recorded deaths. The chapter then widens to counties and compares the causes of early death across levels of deprivation.

Chapter 8.2, Overdose, alcohol and suicide finds that suicide, overdose and homicide death rates are highest in different counties, so the three do not share one map. Its comparison of drug and alcohol deaths rests on the counties where WONDER publishes a count every year, a set that favors larger counties with high rates for their size. The chapter counts deaths and does not measure despair, which is a question about persons taken up in Chapter 6.3, Life evaluation and daily feelings.

Chapter 8.3, Mortality trends, 2018 to 2024 follows those causes from 2018 to 2024 and finds that they kept different schedules. The national overdose rate peaked in 2022 and the alcohol-induced rate in 2021, both were still above their 2019 levels in 2024, suicide stayed near its 2019 level, and homicide rose and came back. WONDER and the modeled panel count different sets of overdose deaths and give different sizes for the rise.

Chapter 8.4, Place and the length of a life finds that life expectancy at birth, for deaths in 2010 to 2015, is lower in the most deprived tenth of census tracts than in the least deprived. It then asks how steadily life expectancy falls with deprivation, what a county average leaves out, how far apart nearby neighborhoods are and whether the ordering repeats inside metros and counties.

Chapter 8.5, Violence and the life-expectancy gap returns to the summary. A rough accounting, not an age-specific decomposition, assigns a share of the life-expectancy gap between the most and the least deprived tenths of tracts to homicide and leaves the rest to every other cause of death. It rests on an assumed number of years of life per death, and it sets homicide rates for 2022 to 2024 beside life expectancy for deaths in 2010 to 2015.