All-cause mortality rapidly increasing for American children

Researchers are sounding the alarm about a “new crisis” of “increasing all-cause mortality in US children.” Their findings were published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The all-cause mortality rate for children ages 1 to 19 years increased by 10.7% between 2019 and 2020. The trend continued from 2020 to 2021, increasing by an additional 8.3%. The researchers found that the increases in childhood mortality were only minimally related to covid-19. Fatal injuries such as drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, suicide, homicide, and vehicle accidents drove the spike in mortality.

“In 2020, the COVID-19 mortality rate at ages 1 to 19 years was 0.24 deaths per 100,000, but the absolute increase in injury deaths alone was nearly 12 times higher (2.80 deaths per 100,000),” wrote the researchers. Study co-author Elizabeth Wolf said, “We’ve now reached a tipping point where the number of injury-related deaths is so high that it is offsetting many of the gains we’ve made in treating other diseases.