Invest in Children recently released the latest Cuyahoga County Child Fatality Review Board Annual Report. The board conducts individual case reviews of all deaths of children younger than 18 years old and makes recommendations to develop community-based prevention strategies. The report is released in the fourth quarter of each year, and reflects the deaths that occurred during the prior year.
There were 165 child deaths in Cuyahoga County in 2021. While this is an increase of 13 over 2020, the number remained 6 percent below the 10-year average.
As is typical each year, some causes of death increased, and some decreased. Most notably, the county's overall infant mortality rate (7.4 per 1,000 live births) reached an all-time-low and reflected the second straight year of a decline. Even more significantly, the county's Black infant mortality rate also reached an historic low of 12.1 after two years of steep declines! While this helped to narrow the gap in infant mortality racial equity, Black babies were still 2.3 times as likely to die as White babies.
