Progress amidst Tragedy
Max Roser and “Our World in Data” – The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates that in 1990 more than 12 million children died. Most of these deaths were preventable, and arose from illness and poverty.
Let’s put this in perspective. Aviation disasters are a form of tragedy that is both relatively uncommon and widely reported. A Boeing 747 can carry up to 620 people. The total number of child deaths in 1990 is equivalent to 53 massive aircraft disasters every day, involving primarily children, with no survivors.
The number of child deaths declined from over 12 million in 1990 to 5.8 million in 2015 (the year for which we have the latest data). Notably, this decline by 6.3 million child deaths happened despite the absolute number of births increasing slightly over the same period.
6.3 million fewer deaths means that compared with 1990, there are 17,258 fewer child deaths every single day.
