The Defender just reported on a child who was said to have died while positive for measles, but key details of the case — even basic ones like age, medications, other medical conditions, and measles strain — are being withheld from the public. To get a public health perspective on measles in the USA, here is the history of cases:
It used to be true that hundreds of thousands of measles cases would occur in a year, but that has been reduced down to just a few hundred cases per year. The downward trend for deaths is even more dramatic. Here is a graph showing the measles death rate in terms of yearly deaths per million:
With over 6 deaths per million persons in 1949, the measles death rate was steeply dropping before the creation of the first-ever measles vaccine. In just the 13 years from 1949 to 1962, the measles death rate had already dropped by two-thirds. Here is the count of deaths you’d expect when applying rates to our population of 335 million:
A public health threshold level which would represent a “time for worry” would be, say, if over a hundred measles deaths were to occur in a year, like would be the case if we once again experienced the measles death rate that we had back in 1971 (implied deaths at 335 million population = 143 measles deaths).
Here is a zoomed-in version showing the measles death rate back in 1970-1971 (above 0.40 per million) versus recent measles death rates (below 0.05 per million):
Reference
[annual US measles cases across time] — https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-measles-cases?yScale=linear
[annual US measles death rates across time] — https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-rate