Impact of COVID-19 on mortality under 5 years old

This paper investigated impact of COVID-19 on mortality under 5 years old. The mortality effects were calculated with two CDC datasets such as the dataset from 2015 to 2020 and the provisional dataset from 2020 to 2022. The result shows that there is no effect of COVID-19 on mortality under 5 years old.

Sir, Munoz et al. studies efficacy and safety of BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine in children younger than 5 years of age.¹ Their research inspired us to study the impact of COVID-19 on mortality among children under five years of age. According to CDC,² the dataset³ entitled “AH_Deaths_by_Year__Sex__and_Age_for_2015–2020.csv” from 2015 to 2020 is available in public. The Python program was developed with the dataset for calculating the impact of COVID-19 on mortality among children under five years of age.⁴ The program, child.py⁴ is automatically scraping the dataset over the Internet and generates a single figure with two graphs. Fig. 1 shows the number of deaths in two age groups: 0 years and 1–4 years. The result shows that there is no effect of COVID-19 on the mortality rate for children under 5 years of age in the United States. The number of deaths under the age of 5 has decreased monotonically for the past six years. According to the provisional CDC dataset,⁵ from Jan. 1, 2020 to Feb. 11, 2023, the total deaths of under 1 year and that of 1–4 years are 60687 and 11666 respectively. This means that the under-five mortality rate trend from January 1, 2020 to February 11, 2023 will be similar to the mortality rate trend from 2015 to 2020. The program child.py is available at the GitHub site.⁴

Fig. 1

the number of deaths under 5 years of age from 2015 to 2020.