Why is drowning on the rise?

Even though it happened about 30 feet from where she stood, Eloise Burke didn’t see or hear her little sister, Ginny, die. It was 1958, a warm but not hot summer day in Miami, and the sisters were playing in a public pool. Ginny, 7, was with some kids Eloise, then 10, didn’t know.

And when those kids took their game to a different part of the pool they left Ginny behind, just below the surface. The little girl drowned the way a lot of people drown; without a visible struggle or a sound. “I remember it for a lot of reasons, of course.

But I really remember how surprised I was,” said Burke, now 75, and living in Costa Mesa. “How could nobody not even notice?” The particular type of horror is on the rise. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, drowning deaths have spiked, nationally and in Orange County.

Though a new report from the Centers for Disease Control doesn’t offer exact year-to-year national totals, it cites drowning rates that pencil out to more than 4,500 deaths each year from 2020 through 2022. That’s at least a 12.5% jump, or 500 more lives lost, from what was a fairly steady national average (about 4,000 drowning deaths per year) for much of the 2010s.

What’s more, because pre-pandemic drowning numbers were holding steady even as the population grew, the new death rates reflect a change in trajectory: A problem that seemed to be slowly improving might be rapidly getting worse. Local health officials say the national trend also has played out i.