After decades of steady improvement, the death rate of America’s children and teens shot up between 2019 and 2021 — and COVID-19 wasn’t the reason.
Gun-related deaths represented the largest share of the increase — by far.
According to an analysis of the most recent death certificate data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the mortality rate among children ages 1 to 19 rose by 11% between 2019 and 2020, and by an additional 8% between 2020 and 2021.
