In recent years, mortality rates among children and adolescents in the U.S. have risen sharply, raising concerns among experts.
From 2019 to 2021, infant mortality increased by 10.7 percent one year and 8.3 percent the next. However, despite what one might think, the COVID-19 pandemic has not been the main cause of this phenomenon.
Among the most common causes of the increased mortality rate among children and adolescents in the US are drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and traffic accidents.
“One might be tempted to think that this has something to do with COVID-19. That is obviously the time period that this occurred, but our analysis found that COVID-19 actually explained relatively little of this increase, these have been caused by trends that predate the pandemic, in some cases predating the pandemic by many years,” said Steven H. Woolf, professor of Family Medicine and Population Health at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Virginia Commonwealth University.
In a press conference organized by Ethnic Media Services, the expert pointed out that between 2019 and 2021, deaths in children between 10 and 19 years old increased by 39 percent in the case of homicides, 114 percent due to drug overdoses and 16 percent due to car accidents.
Firearms, one of the main culprits
In her opportunity, Kim Parker, director of Social and Demographic Trends of the PEW Research Center, commented that in 2021, 60 percent of the deaths of children and adolescents were caused by homicide, while 32 percent were by suicide, both with firearms.
In this regard, Parker pointed out that there is a big difference between the deaths of children from African-descendant communities and white children, since the majority of deaths of African-descendant children are due to homicide, while those of white children were due to suicide.
"African children and adolescents are much more likely than whites, Hispanics and Asians to die from firearm-related injuries," he said.
Kelly Sampson, senior advisor and director of Racial Justice at Brady United, said that many of the issues facing the U.S. regarding firearms have a lot to do with issues like white supremacy and racism.
Sampson recalled that "for example, the Supreme Court has taken a decision based on centuries of precedent to convert the Second Amendment from a civic right in defense of the State to a private right related to self-defense. And self-defense is racially coded in American culture."
In this regard, he noted that Nature magazine published an article demonstrating how society thinks about people who carry firearms in public.
This showed that society considered white people who carried a firearm to be heroic, while those belonging to communities of color did so because they had to protect themselves.
The need to protect the mental health of children and adolescents increases
Due to recent incidents involving firearms, such as school shootings, parents have expressed concern about their children's mental health.
Parker noted that a PEW Research Center survey found that 22 percent of parents are very concerned that their child might be shot, while 42 percent of Hispanic parents said they were extremely or very concerned — about a third of African-American parents have the same level of concern — and nearly 70 percent of parents are at least somewhat concerned that a shooting might occur at their child’s school.
Mayra Alvarez, president of The Children's Partnership, said that children and adolescents "are dying from preventable causes" and stressed the importance of families having easy access to various basic services, noting that the stress caused by these services is one of the reasons why children die.
"We need to make it easier for families to enroll in public benefit programs and access the health care, food, housing and other support they need because all of these issues affect the mental health of our families, the stress, the depression, the anxiety that occurs when parents can't afford to pay for a child's food, rent or when they can't take their children to the doctor, all of these interconnected issues that relate to the fight against poverty and what that poverty contributes to these numbers today," she concluded.
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