Did Increased Lethality Drive the U.S. Homicide Surge During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with one of the largest homicide spikes in U.S. history. Prior research has largely interpreted this increase as reflecting changes in the prevalence of serious violence. We depart from this work by asking a more fundamental question: To what extent did the pandemic-era homicide surge reflect changes in levels of violent crime as opposed to changes in the likelihood that any given act of violence proved fatal? We define the lethality of violence as the conditional probability that a violent incident results in death and approximate this risk using the proportion of homicides among total recorded violent incidents, measured monthly from 2016–2024. Lethality increased by 37.3% immediately following the onset of the pandemic and remained elevated, even as overall violent crime remained stable and, at times, declined. Decomposition analyses indicate that increased lethality was an important contributor to the pandemic-era rise in homicide, accounting for a substantial share of the increase beyond changes in violent crime itself. These findings suggest that the pandemic temporarily altered the fatal consequences of violence and underscore the importance of considering trends in both the level and lethality of violence when explaining changes in homicide rates. By extension, declining lethality may also help explain the sharp post-pandemic decline in homicide rates in the United States.