Global Child Mortality - A ten-fold decrease from 2 centuries ago
Terrible events that can kill many, such as plane crashes, always make the headlines. Yet many daily, recurring tragedies – even the worst ones, like the deaths of thousands of children – do not.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates that in 1990 more than 12 million children died. Most of these deaths went unnoticed by many, were entirely preventable, and arose from illness and poverty rather than dramatic accidents.
Let’s put this in perspective. Some of the largest passenger jets can carry up to 620 people.1 The total number of child deaths in 1990 can be visualized as losing 53 massive aircraft, filled with children, with no survivors, on every single day of that year.
While every major aviation disaster makes the headlines and 53 of them in a single day would certainly lead to media coverage everywhere, we see fewer headlines about the more prevalent causes of mortality. Expressing the unseen, daily cruelty of child death as a hypothetical number of reportable tragedies gives us a sense of the scale of this problem that the world is trying to solve.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-globally