Why Childhood Mortality is Actually Down During the Pandemic
It’s not always easy to notice something that doesn’t happen. If there’s a traffic accident on your street, you know it. If an accident was averted because a quick-witted driver hit the brakes at the right moment, you don’t. It’s been a little like that over the past 30 years as millions of children per year who in previous eras might have died from communicable and vaccine preventable diseases did not, thanks to aggressive immunization and sanitation campaigns. Indeed, the under-five mortality rate in 2019—about 5.2 million children globally—was less than half of what it was in 1990.
As my colleague Emily Barone reports, something similar is happening in the teeth of the COVID-19 pandemic, as under-15 mortality was actually less in 2020 than in previous years. Data from the Human Mortality Database, a research project run by a global team of demographers, show that while so-called “excess mortality”—the number of deaths in a population above a normal baseline—was consistently high throughout each of 38 countries surveyed during the pandemic, the excess mortality was actually in the negative among kids.
In the U.S. that’s meant about 2,500 fewer children died between January and mid-November last year compared with the average of the three years prior—a drop of about 9%. However, demographers do caution that the 2020 tally is almost certainly undercounted due to lags in reporting. Still, the numbers are not expected to reverse themselves completely.
In a year like 2020, that’s astonishing. The reasons for the trend are uncertain but since the leading cause of childhood mortality in the U.S., after the newborn stage, is unintentional injury—things like drownings, car accidents, pedestrian fatalities and accidental suffocations—quarantining at home may simply be keeping kids out of harm’s way. Some early reports support that idea: the U.S. Department of Transportation has estimated there was a 2% drop in motor vehicle traffic crashes during the first half of 2020 compared with the same time period in 2019. National and state level data suggest there were fewer child drownings in 2020 than in 2019. Quarantining may also be keeping kids safer from life-threatening illnesses beyond COVID-19, like pneumonia and influenza.
Not all the news is good, however. For instance, water safety advocates say that declined enrollment in swim programs coupled with a surge in demand for private pools could lead to more accidental drownings in the future. Also, delays in vaccinations for things like measles could cause outbreaks of serious but usually preventable diseases. And reduced access to prenatal care during the shutdown could negatively affect fetal health.
It was never possible that a pandemic that has caused so much suffering in the adult population would spare kids entirely from either its direct or indirect effect. For now, the short-term gains in child survival are at least one small mercy in an otherwise bleak time.
While 24.1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of this morning, only 9.5 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker—representing 2.9% of the overall U.S. population.
Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has been approved for use in a handful of countries, including Argentina, Belarus and Serbia. Now, as Reuters reports , Moscow is aiming higher, seeking approval in the European Union. One major obstacle: no peer-reviewed journal has yet published any results from studies of the vaccine. But Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, promised today that is coming, with peer-reviewed results to be released shortly, proving the vaccine’s efficacy.
The obstacles to achieving herd immunity will diminish considerably when a vaccine is available that does its work in just a single dose, as opposed to the two doses required by the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. That’s why it’s good news that Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine has been shown to generate a long-lasting immune response in an early safety study. More than 90% of participants made neutralizing antibodies within 29 days after receiving the shot, and all participants formed the antibodies within 57 days. The immune response lasted for the full 71 days of the trial. The company expects to get definitive efficacy data from a final-stage study by early next month, potentially leading to regulatory authorization by March.
Africa’s battle to get vaccines into the arms of its 1.2 billion people received a boost today when the African Union announced it had secured 270 million doses for distribution this year. That comes on top of an additional quarter billion doses provided by COVAX (a World Health Organization and Gavi Vaccine Alliance collaboration), CNN reports. Funding for the newest initiative comes from the African Export-Import Band, which is providing $2 billion to manufacturers on behalf of nations that are members of the bank. The moves come at a good time, as Africa is experiencing a second wave of the pandemic, which appears worse than the continent’s previous wave in the summer.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
The Global Situation
More than 92.3 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 1.9 million people have died. On Jan. 13, there were 752,974 new cases and 16,260 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here is every country with over 1.5 million confirmed cases:
Europe is racing to respond to accelerating mutations in the coronavirus, after new, more contagious variants have fueled rising case numbers in the region, Reuters reports . In the U.K., from 5% to 10% of all viral samples in positive tests are made available for gene sequencing to determine the strain and virulence. Denmark has done even better, sequencing up to 10,000 positive samples per week, for an average of 13% so far. Germany, which was slow off the mark and now worries about the spread of new COVID-19 variants within its borders, is preparing to mandate that 5% of all positive samples get sequenced going forward.
China is at last allowing a team of investigators from the World Health Organization to visit Wuhan to look for the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as my colleague Charlie Campbell reports. The group, made up of 10 members from nearly as many countries, had to overcome repeated refusals of earlier requests due to what Beijing claimed were administrative issues. Now that permission has at last been granted, it remains uncertain how free a hand the researchers will have. It is not clear, for example, if the team will be visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology—the research facility that has been accused, without evidence, of accidentally releasing the virus by some U.S. politicians.
Providing vaccines now tops the list of challenges the Palestinian Authority (PA) faces in ministering to the needs of the populations of the West Bank and Gaza—and the PA is lagging badly behind the rest of the world, according to Middle East Eye. As yet, no vaccines have become available in the two areas, despite repeated deadlines the PA had set for itself—and then missed. But things might be looking up: Earlier this week, the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced approval of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine for use in the territories. The PA has also received a formal letter from AstraZeneca, promising that its vaccine will arrive in the territories sometime in the last two weeks of February.
The Situation in the U.S.
The U.S. had recorded more than 23 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 384,000 people have died. On Jan. 13, there were 232,943 new cases and 3,848 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
And here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents.
The pandemic continues to clobber the U.S. economy, with 1.15 million workers filing initial claims for state unemployment benefits during the first full week of 2021, as the Department of Labor reports . This surge was not unexpected after the government reported the economy lost 140,000 jobs in December, which marked the first time month-over-month employment was in the negative since the precipitous job losses of the spring. Back then 22 million jobs were lost and so far, only 12 million have been regained.
Florida has always been a destination for vacationers and retirees over 65—and as the first state to offer COVID-19 vaccines to people in that age group, in December, it is now being inundated with what some state officials are calling “vaccine tourism.” Residents of other states, Canada and Latin America are flocking to the Sunshine State bringing proof of age and lining up for shots, reports the Wall Street Journal. One private jet service in Toronto is selling seats on charter flights into and out of the state on the same day—stopping only to get their shot—for up to $80,000.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Jan. 13, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
In Georgia, Vaccinations Mean Connections
Like other states, Georgia is prioritizing health care workers as the first recipients of vaccines, but a clumsy rollout has, as Olivia Messer in The Daily Beast reports, created an environment in which people can use connections (a neighbor who is a nurse) or mere persistence (showing up at a pharmacy every day asking for a shot until the druggist finally agrees) to get vaccinated. Read more here.
Grim and Grimmer
The official COVID-19 worldwide death toll, which is approaching 2 million, is likely a good deal lower than the true count, according to the Wall Street Journal. Calculating not just deaths officially attributed to COVID-19, but overall increases in global deaths over what would be expected in 2020, the WSJ analysis pegs the figure closer to 2.8 million. Many COVID-19 deaths, the Journal concludes, are simply not being reported officially. Read more here.
Keep Your Live Entertainment
What’s a film festival without mingling in the lobby, drink in hand, after a screening? What’s a concert without the buzz of being there? Plenty, actually, argues Emily Yahr, in the Washington Post. When entertainment goes virtual, it opens up access to people who might not have the freedom or the financial wherewithal to travel for the in-person experience. Once the pandemic ends, we may never go back to the way things were. Read more here.
Can Your Boss Mandate a Vaccine?
As millions of Americans wait their turn to receive their vaccines, questions linger about whether employers can go a step further—requiring vaccinations as a condition for returning to work once the vaccines are universally available. The answer, as the Associated Press reports, is yes—and no. Read more here.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Jeffrey Kluger and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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