A recently-released CDC dataset detailing provisional COVID deaths by age from January 1st, 2020 to September 15th, 2021 appear to show that less child deaths were linked to COVID in that time-frame than would have died from the flu in a typical year.
Comparing this dataset to CDC’s WONDER database, it is clear that COVID-19 accounts for a lower percentage of total child deaths than any of 2019’s 10 leading causes of child death; that even leaves COVID well behind 2019’s 9th-leading cause of death: Influenza and Pneumonia.
Assuming similar cause-of-death trends in 2020 and 2021 as existed in 2019:
The cause of a child’s death would be 9.49 times more likely to be suicide; 8.46 times more likely to be homicide; 2.02 times more likely to be a drug overdose or alcohol poisoning; and 1.29 times more likely to be influenza.
The infographic below demonstrates the 10 most common causes of death for children aged 1-18 for 2019. Note that this leaves out newborn deaths (as they account for roughly half the total number of child deaths and unacceptably skew the data) and it doesn’t account for seasonality (comparing Jan-Dec 2019 to Jan-2020-Sep-2021).
