CDC: Infant death rate rose in 2021 after 5-year decline

The rate of infants dying before their first birthday rose slightly in the second year of the COVID pandemic after having fallen every year since 2015, according to new federal data.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday that the U.S. infant mortality rate inched from 5.42 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2020 to 5.44 deaths per 1,000 births in 2021.

According to the report, the rate had increased on only three previous occasions — 2002, 2005 and 2015 — after the CDC first linked infant births and deaths in a single file in 1995.

The rate has fallen by 21% since 2005, when it hit a “recent high” of 6.86 deaths per 1,000 live births, the report said.

“Annual infant mortality trends are important to report about because understanding the basic relationships between risk factors and infant mortality may help identify high-risk subgroups for prevention efforts,” Danielle Ely, a CDC statistician and co-author of the report, told The Washington Times.

The CDC found 19,928 babies died before reaching their first birthday in 2021, up 2% from 19,578 deaths in 2020. Over the same period, Americans had 50,645 more children, as live births increased from 3,613,647 to 3,664,292.

In 2021, the CDC found the five leading causes of infant deaths were the same as those in 2020: congenital malformations (20% of deaths), disorders related to short gestation and low birth weight (15%), sudden infant death syndrome (7%), unintentional injuries (7%) and maternal complications (6%).

According to the report, the U.S. infant mortality rate has “generally trended downward” since 1995, making 2021 an outlier in the data.

The report also found the neonatal death rate for babies who died before 28 days remained “essentially unchanged” and the post-neonatal death rate for those who died after 28 days increased by 5% from 2020 to 2021. Both had experienced similar declines in recent decades.

The CDC report did not explain the changes in 2021.

Reached for comment, Josh Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said only time will tell whether the numbers represent a one-year blip or the start of a new trend.

“Infant mortality is the measure of a population’s general health, but I’m reluctant to draw conclusions from a single year of data,” Mr. Sharfstein told the Times. “All of the stress and chaos of the pandemic didn’t make things better for infant health.”