The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office is releasing preliminary statistics for cases it handled in 2022. The Office’s caseload continued to significantly surpass pre-COVID levels, with 10,443 cases falling under the Office’s jurisdiction last year. This is a drop from a peak caseload of 16,047 in 2020 and 12,612 cases in 2021. Before the pandemic began, the Office saw approximately 6,200 deaths in an average year. Nearly 43 percent of all cases in 2022 were Black and just over 14 percent Latino.  The Office handled a total of 927 homicides in 2022, 740 in the City of Chicago. Overall homicides fell by more than 15 percent in Cook County from their peak in 2021.The other County municipalities with the highest number of homicides included Harvey with 15, Dolton with 11, Riverdale with nine and Maywood with eight. African Americans were the victims of 76 percent of homicides and Latinos accounted for more than 18 percent of homicide deaths. Males accounted for 86 percent of homicide deaths. While overall homicides declined, the number of children killed went up by almost 13 percent with 97 of the homicide victims under the age of 18; 21 were under the age of 10. The County is also on pace to beat 2021’s record for opioid overdose deaths. While the Office still awaits the results of hundreds of toxicology tests, it has already confirmed 1,599 opioid overdose deaths for 2022. The MEO anticipates that approximately 400 – 500 of its pending cases will be due to opioid toxicity, putting the final number for 2022 over 2,000.