A research letter published Monday detailed the abnormally high infant mortality rate in the U.S. which has been increasing since Covid.
“The literature documents a long-standing health disadvantage in the US relative to other high-income countries,1,2 with excess deaths due in part to disproportionately high mortality rates. Few studies3 have quantified the number of excess deaths that have occurred among US infants, children, and adolescents, and none based on mortality data from recent years,” the research letter said. “Recent years have seen an increase in youth mortality due to homicide, suicide, and drug overdoses and in all-cause mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-sectional study compared US mortality rates among youths aged 0 to 19 years with those of 16 comparison countries, calculated excess deaths for 1999 to 2019, and examined temporal trends through 2021.”
Although one must pay for full access to the letter, an article by Brenda Baletti in The Defender quoted the full version as saying:
“Each year, nearly 20,000 deaths among youths ages 0 to 19 years would not have occurred had US youths experienced the median mortality rates of 16 comparison countries,” the authors wrote. “More than half of these deaths involved infants, reflecting disproportionately high US infant mortality rates.”
Notably, Monday’s research letter is only the latest in a long series of work chronicling this above-average mortality rate.
Hellbound and Down 