Infant Deaths Throughout the COVID‐19 Pandemic in the U.S

To gain further insight into the course of births during the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted an electronic search of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Vital Statistics System to obtain data on infant deaths recorded from 2018 through 2023. The mean infant death rate ×1000 in the 2 years before the pandemic was 5.63 ± 0.4, decreased to 5.43 ± 0.01 in the first two pandemic years, and increased again to 5.61 ± 0.1 in the endemic period (Figure 1). The difference between the pre-pandemic years was statistically significant compared to the pandemic years (p = 0.029), resulting in a cumulative reduction in the infant mortality rate of −0.195 (95% confidence interval (CI), −0.037 to −0.353; p < 0.001; −3.5%), but not with the two endemic years 2022–2023 (p = 0.863). The results of our analysis suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to have had a significant negative impact on the U.S. infant death rate, as infant mortality may have even declined by approximately 3.5% during the first 2 years of the pandemic