As Covid swept the United States, another epidemic took hold: Americans shot one another at the fastest pace since the 1990s.
To document the toll, we plotted every fatal shooting on a map and then compared the four pandemic years with the four years that came before.
Not only were more people killed, we found, but the boundaries of where these killings took place expanded.
By the end of last year, one in seven Americans lived within a quarter mile of a recent fatal shooting, up from one in nine before the pandemic.
Persons:
Covid
Locations:
United States