Baltimore has recorded 11 sleep-related infant deaths so far in 2026, matching the city's total for all of 2025 with four months still on the calendar. City health officials say co-sleeping or bed sharing with a parent or caregiver was involved in about 74 percent of those cases.
That pace, not the raw number, is what prompted the warning. Eleven deaths in a city of Baltimore's size is not a record. Eleven deaths by early September, when the previous full year produced the same figure, is a trajectory that officials do not want to see complete itself.
