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Drowning deaths surged during the pandemic — and it was worse among Black people, CDC reports
The nationwide surge in accidental drowning deaths early during the COVID-19 pandemic was disproportionately worse for Black people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday — a finding in line with longstanding disparities.
Compared to 2019, drowning rates increased among Black people by 22.2% in 2020 and 28.3% in 2021. Drowning rates were the worst overall for Black people as well as American Indian and Alaska Native people in those first two years.
In 2022, the largest increase was in Hispanic people. For them, drowning deaths that year climbed 24.8% above levels seen in 2019 before the pandemic.
“Drowning is a serious public health problem. Drowning can happen to anyone, at any time, there is access to water. It can be quick, silent, and deadly,” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, told reporters Tuesday.
Overall, the CDC blames around 4,000 deaths each year on accidental drowning. Health officials and experts previously warned of an uptick in drowning deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the highest rates among young children under five years old.
“The exact cause of the recent increase in drowning death rates and widening disparities is unknown,” Tessa Clemens, a health scientist with the CDC’s Division of Injury Prevention, said.
Clemens cited shortages of swimming lessons and lifeguards during the pandemic, as well as larger social barriers limiting access to safety precautions, as among the potential explanations for the increases and disparities.
The study published Tuesday took a closer look at demographic breakdowns of those drowning trends from the first three years of the pandemic, alongside new federal survey results on the topic.
It comes as data tallied by the agency for 2023 suggests that unintentional drowning deaths might have slowed back down to around pre-pandemic levels. At least 3,845 deaths in 2023 were blamed on unintentional drowning, though the figures have not yet been finalized.
Drowning deaths by race
Racial disparities in drowning deaths are not new. Before the pandemic, the CDC reported the gap between drowning death rates in White versus Black people was widening.
“We did see these disparities prior to the pandemic, and for several decades. It is concerning that there are increases in drowning rates among some of these groups that were already at disparately higher risk for drowning,” said Clemens.
One data point that might help explain the disparity in drowning deaths could be a gap in swimming skills.
In its new study, the CDC found that more than a third of Black adults and around a quarter of Hispanic adults said that they did not know how to swim, when asked by an agency-funded survey in November. This was multiple times higher than White adults, of whom 6.9% say they do not know how to swim.
More than half of white adults also say they have taken swimming lessons, compared to 36.9% of Black adults and 28.1% of Hispanic adults.
Black adults were also less likely to have spent time at swimming pools and other bodies of water, suggesting that rates of drowning deaths may be even worse for Black people than the topline figures suggest.
More than half of White adults said they had spent time at a swimming pool or other body of water in the last six months. Less than a third of Black adults had spent time at pools and only around a quarter in other bodies of water.
“Findings related to adults’ exposure to recreational water suggest that population-based drowning rates might be underestimating disparities,” the study’s authors wrote.
Drowning deaths by age
While drowning death rates remain the worst for young children ages 1 to 4 years old, the study found that deaths did not increase significantly in 2020.
The authors say this complicates the theory that young children spending more time at home during the pandemic, swimming in places like backyard pools, could explain the pandemic increase. Instead, rates of deaths for these young children only increased in 2021 and 2022.
That year, the CDC study’s authors found that the largest increase in drowning death rates was in young adults ages 15 to 24 years old, climbing by 31.3% compared to 2019.
While the increases were not as large, the next highest rates in drowning deaths after young children remain in seniors, where rates have been worsening for decades.
Seniors at least 65 years old were also the least likely to tell the CDC survey in November that they had ever taken swimming lessons among all age groups. In this age group, 18.6% say they do not know how to swim.
“More work is needed to understand the circumstances of drowning among older adults in the United States and to develop tailored drowning prevention strategies,” the study’s authors said.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Saturday that would have required new cars to beep at drivers if they exceed the speed limit in an effort to reduce traffic deaths.
California would have become the first to require such systems for all new cars, trucks and buses sold in the state starting in 2030. The bill would have mandated that vehicles beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph.
The European Union has passed similar legislation to encourage drivers to slow down. California’s proposal would have provided exceptions for emergency vehicles, motorcycles and motorized scooters.
In explaining his veto, Newsom said federal law already dictates vehicle safety standards and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations.
The National Highway Traffic Safety “is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments,” the Democratic governor said.
Opponents, including automotive groups and the state Chamber of Commerce, said such regulations should be decided by the federal government, which earlier this year established new requirements for automatic emergency braking to curb traffic deaths. Republican lawmakers also said the proposal could make cars more expensive and distract drivers.
The legislation would have likely impacted all new car sales in the U.S., since the California market is so large that car manufacturers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply.
California often throws that weight around to influence national and even international policy. The state has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.
Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bill, called the veto disappointing and a setback for street safety.
“California should have led on this crisis as Wisconsin did in passing the first seatbelt mandate in 1961,” Wiener said in a statement. “Instead, this veto resigns Californians to a completely unnecessary risk of fatality.”
The speeding alert technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS to compare a vehicle’s pace with a dataset of posted limits. If the car is at least 10 mph over, the system emits a single, brief, visual and audio alert.
The proposal would have required the state to maintain a list of posted speed limits, and it’s likely that those would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.
The technology has been used in the U.S. and Europe for years. Starting in July, the European Union will require all new cars to have the technology, although drivers would be able to turn it off. At least 18 manufacturers including Ford, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan, have already offered some form of speed limiters on some models sold in America, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were related to speeding. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.
Last year the NTSB recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when they speed. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022, when a man with a history of speeding violations ran a red light at more than 100 mph and struck a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.
