The death rate for US children has surged by 25 percent over the past decade, according to a study published last month by pediatrician Dr. Christopher Forrest and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Even as the child mortality rate has slowly fallen in other developed countries, it has surged in the US, along with every other indicator of chronic illness.
I could do without the editorialization then. I could use some help interpreting the numbers, but they lose me with words like “staggering”.
How would you describe 54 excess child deaths per day? Harrowing maybe? Depressing perhaps?
Or you think it’s possibly not one of this? It’s it comforting to you? Pretty weird one to be upset over and describe as editorialization.
The US population is 300 million so I would want to know whether 54 is a lot or a few. 54 excess means we expected to get N, but instead we got N+54. So my first question is: what is N? Are we over by a few percent, or by a factor of 20, or what?
See? You’re arguing over a word without bothering to read the article or understand the statistic.
The question “what is N” doesn’t make sense here. Excess child deaths doesn’t mean we expect N deaths and are okay with that…
Let me explain:
Take the actual U.S. child deaths.
Compute a counterfactual N* = how many would have died if the U.S. had the same age-specific child mortality rates as peer rich countries.
Excess = Actual − N*. It’s the avoidable difference, not an acceptable target.
That’s why the piece says ~316,000 excess child deaths (≈54 per day) from 2007–2022, those are deaths above what we’d expect if U.S. kids had peer-country risk.
And if you want scale: U.S. kids weren’t a few percent worse off. In 2014 they were ~1.6× more likely to die than peers; by 2022 it was ~2.3×—that’s 60% to 130% higher risk, not “a factor of 20,” but nowhere near “just a little bit” either. It’s staggering!
If a toy number helps: suppose peers have 25 deaths per 100k children in a year and the U.S. has ~58 per 100k. Apply those rates to the U.S. child population and you’d “expect” ~N* at the peer rate but observe far more; the gap between them is the excess. The study’s bottom line is that this gap averaged ~54 preventable child deaths every day over 16 years.
In other words, the US is a third world country.
Thanks, yes, we agree about what excess means. Rather than toy numbers I was hoping you could supply the actual numbers. It might be easiest to compare actuarial tables for different countries. Also, if the number of excess deaths has shot up suddenly in the past 5 years, that might be from COVID. We would have to look at medical, public health, and other explanations. Nowadays we also have to add vaccine hesitancy.
I live in the US and would say it’s pretty good in some ways and messed up others, like most countries. This sounds like one of the messed up parts, but I think I can say that without sensationalism.
COVID affected all other developed nations being compared. Again the N you’re seeking doesn’t matter.
If we had 1,000 additional deaths per day worldwide, it still wouldn’t be counted in the excess deaths. Excess deaths is relative to other developed nations.
Why did their excess deaths not rise similarly? What’s unique about the US? It’s not COVID, friend.
The US had some really terrible COVID policies about masking, school ventilation, etc. Other countries were often better, sometimes worse. And now we’ve got RFK Jr running the asylum.
Anyway, as you say, excess deaths are relative to other nations, so I need to know the baseline. That’s N, and yes it matters.
At the moment it seems to me that the US has worse overall health and shorter life expectancy than, say, EU countries, but not by huge margins.[1] That’s for all ages and income levels. Not good, but not something that makes me immediately want to move, and I feel more threatened by other things like accelerating global warming.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/money-cant-buy-life-the-richest-americans-die-earlier-than-the-poorest-europeans/
Okay… I didn’t realize we’re talking about your personal tolerance of it, as long as you’re okay with it I guess the numbers aren’t staggering.
We aren’t talking about overall life expectancy, we’re talking about excess child mortality. COVID affected children the least, remember.
You can have multiple concerns, you really don’t have to champion just one issue and attack all others. Recall your objections and the whole argument we’re having is because you’re insisting the article is editorializing 54 excess child deaths a day by calling it staggering. Would you complain the same way about an article describing the average annual increase of global temperature as staggering?
I would like to know whether the excess child mortality is something to actually worry about, let’s say if I had kids. There is a chance of my kid being eaten by a leopard but here in the urban US, it’s unlikely enough that it’s not one of the hazards I take special precautions against. Again, it comes down to the likelihood, which means what is N. If you don’t know N, then describing a related number as “staggering” is just a bluff. Let’s presume “child” means age < 18, and my kid is currently 8. What is the likelihood of his not surviving childhood, compared to other countries? To find that, you need N, or something computed using N, such as life insurance premiums.
It’s editorialization but less of a bluff to describe global warming as staggering, since it can be backed up with evidence of real impact that it has on everyone, where it is going, and that it needs interventions if it isn’t too late for those.
By comparison, look at the freakouts about kids being abducted by strangers. It happens and it makes headlines, but it’s very rare compared to abductions by relatives, for example. I’m very glad to have not been overprotected from this when I was a kid. Being able to go out by myself when I wanted made me independent in a good way, imho.
The child mortality difference sounds to me like a consequence of the well known suckage of the US healthcare system, but wrapped in “think of the children!”[0] breathlessness. If it’s disproportionate I’d like to see data indicating this.
And yes, COVID affects children[1,2], another example of crazy US COVID policy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/242894/covid-19-leading-cause-death-children-young/
[2] https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/long-covid-is-now-the-number-one