Stats on Dying Well Before Your Time

I'm supposed to be posting the February Twitter round-up today, but I don't have time for the whole thing... so tomorrow, I hope.

Instead, here's one item from it. It started with this tweet from an account called @StatisticUrban:

Heart-wrenching statistic: one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. Vastly, vastly worse than our peer countries:

She followed that by commenting, "Drugs, guns, and cars."

Another person replied with this link to a CDC page that shows the top 10 causes of death among people under the age of 44 from 1981 to 2021 as a series of bar graphs, year by year in an animated gif. So you can see how they have changed over time, with suicide rising relatively as a cause, and suddenly in the last few years the huge increase in "unintentional injury," which includes overdoses as well as car crashes.

You can see the rapid rise (and fall) of deaths from HIV in the animation, and much later a bar appears for COVID-19.

There's also a static chart breaking down the causes of unintentional death  over the same years:

Click to enlarge for better readability. 

In this chart I see the decline in motor vehicle deaths that occurred in the 2010s, but which has begun to reverse itself in the past several years (the medium blue color), though it's far out-paced by the dark blue poisoning bars (overdoses). The gradual decline of the gray bars at the bottom, which represent all other unintentional causes (and also — harder to read — the parallel declines in drownings and falls) — speaks to the fact that children have generally become safer from accidents since the 1980s. Except from cars, and once they get older, from fatal-overdose-inducing drugs. (Accidental shootings are part of the gray bars, I assume. Suicide and homicide from guns are not included here.)