Report: Pandemic Caused Smaller ‘Baby Bust’ Than Expected

Provisional data on the number of births in the United States showed that the COVID-19 pandemic might have had less of an impact on a “baby bust” than was originally anticipated.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States experienced around 7,000 fewer births in the initial nine months of 2021 when contrasted with the same time period a year before, per provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

“Starting in June 2021, monthly births began to show consistent gains over their year-earlier levels, which reflect pre-pandemic conceptions, and that mostly offset declines in the first two months of 2021, the data show,” the Journal noted, adding that the 2021 numbers are nationwide provisional estimates and “[t]he federal government will issue a final count later this year, a CDC spokesman said. The provisional data are rounded to the nearest thousand and might differ from the final numbers by as much as 2%, according to the NCHS.”

Some experts believed the COVID-19 pandemic would have a much larger impact on the birth rate across the country. In December, economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine reportedly put forward numbers demonstrating how the pandemic resulted in 60,000 missing births from October 2020 through February 2021. “Earlier in the pandemic, they predicted the health crisis and economic uncertainty would lead to 300,000 to a half million fewer births last year,” the outlet added.

“The Covid baby bust doesn’t seem to be nearly as large as I thought it would be,” said Kearney. (Read more from “Report: Pandemic Caused Smaller ‘Baby Bust’ Than Expected” HERE)

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