Trendspotting: Is the Pandemic Baby Bust Smaller Than Expected?

NewsWire: 2/25/22

• According to 2021 provisional data, the pandemic baby bust in the U.S. was smaller than expected. Births were down by just 7,000 YoY in the first nine months. (The Wall Street Journal)
  
• NH: The CDC has just updated its provisional birth data through Q3 2021. And the WSJ claims the numbers point to a smaller pandemic baby bust than expected. Let’s explore the data. 
• In the first nine months of 2021, there were approximately 2.73M births. That’s only -7,087 fewer births than in the same period the year prior. Births fell significantly in January and February but rebounded from March through December. This pattern generally follows the rise and fall of C19 deaths at the time of conception. (See “60,000 Missing Births?”) 

• In six of the nine months, monthly births were higher than 2020 levels. And the four biggest YoY gainers were the most recent four months.

• We had initially predicted that the number of births in 2021 would be significantly lower than in 2020. This is because 2020 largely represented pre-pandemic conceptions, whereas 2021 fully reflected the pandemic. (See “CDC Releases Final 2020 Birth Data.”) But now, 2021 is looking better. The YoY comps for the most recent months were all births (in 2020) that reflect pre-pandemic conceptions.
• Why? Perhaps stimulus combined with the low death count in the summer and early fall of 2020 convinced more people to have children--and, perhaps, to "make up" for any conceptions they did not have during the spring.
• We still don’t yet know what happened to births in Q4 2021. On the one hand, we would expect births to be low because they reflect conceptions during the severe pandemic winter of 2021 when the US experienced its largest wave of C19 deaths. On the other hand, births in October-December 2020 are already extremely low. It wouldn’t take much for fall 2021 births to beat those easy comps.
• All in all, I expect CY 2021 births to be a bit higher than births in CY 2020. At worst, it will be about the same (3.605M). At best, it will be a couple of percentage points higher (maybe 3.680M). As for the TFR, it too will likely rise slightly from its 2020 level (1.64).