COVID-19 has become the eighth leading cause of infant death in recent months, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Children are less likely to die from COVID-19 than any other age group, with less than 1% of all deaths since the start of the pandemic occurring among those under the age of 18, according to federal data.
Despite this, the coronavirus has been one of the leading causes of child death in recent years, CNN reported.
Context: In 2019, a year before the pandemic, the leading causes of death among children were perinatal conditions, unintentional injuries, birth defects, assaults, suicides, cancerous tumors, heart disease, the flu, and pneumonia.
- According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children are less vaccinated against COVID-19 than any other age group in the US.
- Less than 10% of eligible children have received their up-to-date booster shot, and more than 90% of children under 5 years of age are completely unvaccinated.
- The time period analyzed by the researchers coincided with the increase in cases of COVID-19 of the delta and omicron variants.
The data: Between August 2021 and July 2022, 1 in 100,000 children ages 0-9 died from COVID-19., according to CDC data.
- That death rate ranks eighth among children 0-9 years old and fifth among adolescents 15-19 years old.
- The researchers analyzed CDC data and calculated that a total of 821 children died.
- Between 2021 and 2022, COVID-19 ranked fifth in non-disease-related deaths and first in deaths from infectious or respiratory diseases.
