There were 160 births per day in Occitanie in March 2021. – Madien Deutschenbaur – PixaBay
We now know that the baby boom of the first confinement, which some intuitively predicted, never took place. Even in Occitania, yet relatively spared by the first wave, births fell by 12% in January according to
INSEE and 6% in February compared to 2020. The fall over the first two months of the year could even be spectacular in Aude (-19%), Aveyron (-17%) or ‘Ariège (-16%). It reached -7% in Haute-Garonne.
But the statistics institute now has data for the month of March. It can therefore now count the babies conceived just after the first deconfinement. And it seems that then the parents were taken with a breath of optimism for the future because the curve is radically reversed: 4,900 small Occitans were born in March against 4,700 in March 2020, an increase of 5% . It is only in Ariège and the Hautes-Pyrénées that the arrivals of newborns do not exceed the level of March 2020.
The baby boom in March, which says a lot about the effects of deconfinement on morale, “is not enough, however, warn demographers, to offset the declines and January and February”.
Much less encouraging. INSEE has also just released the figures for mortality in Occitania in April: among more than 65%, 562 additional deaths were recorded compared to the average for April 2018-2019.