Dr Clare Craig Profile picture
Co-Chair HART: https://t.co/8NvaTOTiF5 Diagnostic pathologist, lover of data, digital pathology and AI, sceptical but optimistic. Views my own not the RCPath's.

Aug 26, 13 tweets

USA - your babies are dying.

I have taken a deep dive to understand exactly what's happening with deaths of under 1 year olds.

Who wants to look at baby deaths?
I get it.
But DO NOT LOOK AWAY.
It is....

First of all I did this because of frustration with people arguing over what "expected" deaths should look like.

You can make up reasons for picking particular years and come up with a totally different story.

'99-'19 excess deaths from '21
'11-'16 deficit in deaths from '21

What can we do to see if the rise is meaningful?

First we can look monthly ('24 and '25 data is incomplete)

Here are the monthly deaths for females which rises from March 2021 (having been below expected before) and stays high except for deficit in winter 2021-2022.

Here's the same for males.

The excess is not as high.

Female excess '21-'23 inclusive = 1523
Male excess '21-'23 inclusive = 890

Here is the percentage of deaths that were female.

This is highly statistically significant and highly indicative of a new pathology not present in 2020.

Next I looked at cause of death.

SIDS was 76% of deaths of unknown cause in under 1s in 1999 but only half by 2019.

Therefore, I looked at all deaths of unknown cause.

Again there is a highly statistically significant rise from 2021 on.

Lastly, I looked at race differences.

CDC coding and definitions keep changing but I am hoping they were at least consistent for both deaths and populaiton making mortality rate reliable. Groupings changed so I just looked at white and black / african american.

Female:

The ratio of white to black babies dying has, like the other markers, rocketed since 2021.

It is statistically significant but worse for females.

Males

It turns out that black babies (while they sadly die more overall) have not seen an increase since 2021.

The increase is in white babies.

Females

Males

These deaths include deaths attributed to covid (a total of about 350) - but notably the same age group did not see many deaths in 2020.

Unlike for other age groups children saw worse covid mortality than 2020 only after vaccines were introduced.

And 2023>2021!

With three statistically significant and large signals in sex ratio, deaths of unknown cause and race ratio there is indeed a cause for alarm. The rise is real.

In 2021, I reassured friends that when the babies started dying it would all be over. I was so very wrong.

full article on DrClareCraig S* Stack

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