Toddler and Teen Terror 2022 U.S. Mortality: Large Increases Over 2019
School-aged children have relatively small increase in death rates
Continuing on with my cause-of-death analysis for 2022 by age group. Here are prior posts:
Millennial 2022 U.S. Mortality: Drug Overdoses Still Dominate
Gen X 2022 U.S. Mortality: Drug ODs Did Us In More Than COVID
Boomer 2022 Mortality: Much Improved, Still Elevated Over 2019
Now we get to the childhood deaths, and the causes driving rises in 2022 differ quite a bit. I split up this group, ages 1-17, into three age groupings:
Teens: 13-17 years old
School-aged kids: 5-12 years old
Toddlers: 1-4 years old
Under one year old is infant mortality and must be handled very differently. I will discuss that at the end of this post.
Last year’s equivalent post:
Last year, it was only the teenagers who had a large increase, and we’ll see those provisional results had come in a little high. But it still was within spitting range. The other two age groups did not have much of an increase.
That was not true in 2022.
High-level rate results for ages 1-17
Let us keep things in perspective before getting worked up too much: these are very low death rates.
Age 5-12 (the school-aged group) have the lowest death rates of every age group in the U.S. They barely saw any increase in mortality through the pandemic. Yes, there is some increase, but it’s not much.
The teenagers in 2022 were basically at the same high level they saw in 2021. Teenagers saw the death rates jump up in 2020, a little more in 2021, and then it’s plateaued… perhaps.
The toddler (age 1-4) group saw death rates go down in 2020, but then it increased in both 2021 and 2022.
Let’s dig down into causes.
Age 1-4, Death by Cause
Longer term trend, 1999 - 2022
First, you will notice there is a “new” cause of death in this list that pops out for little kids: drowning.
In normal ranking tables, drowning and motor vehicle accident deaths are both combined into the major category of “accidents”. This is not helpful for true analysis of mortality trends in this age group — we will see this when we get to teens.
Motor vehicle accident death rates almost halved from 1999-2019, and drowning deaths decreased by 25%. By 2019, drowning deaths for kids aged 1-4 outnumbered motor vehicle accident deaths in America.
All these other major named causes you can see in the graph decreased about 30% from 1999-2019. Heck, even the “other causes” decreased by a third.
Then the pandemic came.
Age 1-4: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
I didn’t do this with the prior posts, but that was due to the causes of death decreasing being minimal in magnitude for other age groups. That’s not true for children.
Until 2022.
Yes, there are things in that “all other causes”, but it’s not clear to me at this point It may be other accidental causes of death — fires and poisonings — but one needs to be careful.
Data Warning
These are based on provisional data. If you download my spreadsheet below and look at the original data, you’ll see that the underlying raw data draws have as population estimates (the denominator) for 2022 and 2021 are exactly the same.
(Oh, and there are 2023 data, and the population estimates are the same there, too).
For the older age groups, where there have been a huge number of deaths involved for a specific cause of death(thousands to tens of thousands for the group), this is not a big deal.
But the total number of deaths for kids aged 1-4 in 2022 was about 4100, total accidental deaths (any kind) were about 1,000 deaths, Motor vehicle accident deaths were 366, etc.
The error bars become very wide - I didn’t get into that sort of stuff.
This may be something I have to return to, but it may turn out that, when 2022 statistics are made final, this particular pattern goes away.
Age 5-12, Deaths by Cause
Longer term trend, 1999 - 2022
This is the happiest of all the mortality graphs of all the age groups — the lowest death rates of all age groups for this entire period, and it barely got affected by COVID deaths and other causes didn’t increase too much.
Someone recently posted something about “WOW! Childhood death rates are way down (historically) 1960 - 2020” as if it was due to helicopter parenting….
Well, look at 1999-2019: motor vehicle accident deaths for school-aged kids halved. Just like with toddlers.
That is a huge contributor.
Age 5-12: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
Again, don’t freak out — OH! Homicide is so huge!
Look at the vertical scale on this. Scroll up and look at the age 1-4 graph.
This is out of 100,000 people per year. These differences are very small.
Age 13-17, Deaths by Cause
Longer term trend, 1999 - 2022
Here comes the depressing stuff.
From 1999 to 2014, you can see mortality improvement.
Reduction in motor vehicle accident deaths was a huge part of that improvement. Motor vehicle accident deaths improved even more for teens than for the younger ages - over 60% decrease from 1999 to 2019.
But then, 2015-2017 you can see a really bad trend - increases in suicide, homicide, and motor vehicle accident deaths.
Oh, and the pandemic? You can barely see the COVID, but you can see the large jump up in motor vehicle accident deaths and drug overdoses. Also, homicides. It’s difficult to see what’s going on with suicide, so I’ll show that below.
Age 13-17: Attribution of increase in mortality, 2020-2022
Can’t see suicide, except for that small negative contribution in 2022. That’s right - we haven’t seen an increase in suicide rates for teens.
But we’ve seen huge increases in homicides, drug overdoses, and motor vehicle accident deaths. That’s pretty horrible,
To be sure, on an absolute measure, if you compare this to the adult groups, these amounts are small, but it’s still pretty shocking the percentage increase.
Summary tables of contribution to excess mortality, ages 1-17
So let us look at the attribution tables, and here we can see the major causes that actually decreased during the pandemic.
2020
You’ve got to be careful with this one: because death rates overall decreases for ages 1-4 and 5-12, the causes with negative percentages actually increased in 2020 compared to 2019, and those with positive percentages decreased.
2021
Again, don’t over-react to what’s going on with ages 5-12 — the overall death rate increased only 2% compared to 2019. We’re dealing with extremely small changes.
2022
Again, the only age group with “substantial” COVID contribution barely had any death rate increase at all.
Most of the child age groups had much different death cause increases having nothing directly to do with COVID, but perhaps having something to do with the policy surrounding COVID — or perhaps something else entirely.
Spreadsheet
On Infant Mortality
I have not yet decided whether to do a post on infant mortality trends through the pandemic.
There are data issues trickier than the age 1-4 group, but here’s another:
Do you catch how time is done for infant mortality? I have to think about how to handle that. The causes of death are also special:
Yeah. This is ugly. So I’m thinking about it, but it may be some time.