Death Rate vs Mortality Rate
If you are a human being, you are a mortal. This means you will die one day, or in other words, are a mere mortal. Mortality is being susceptible to death, and thus, mortality rate is the rate that refers to number of deaths per 1000 persons in a population, in a given unit of time that is usually taken to be a year. There is another concept of death rate that confuses many because of its similarity with the mortality rate. Let us take a closer look at the two related concepts of death rate and mortality rate.
Death Rate
Number of deaths per thousand people in a population is referred to as crude death rate. This is also called mortality. This is opposite to the number of births per thousand people in a population that s referred to as natality. If one subtracts the death rate from birth rate in a place, he effective arrives at the rate of natural increase. There are places in the world where rate of natural increase is negative because of a higher death rate than the birth rate. On the other hand, there are many countries where governments are burdened with high birth rates as they have to allocate more resources on welfare programs. Death rates all over the world have been declining in the last 50 years because of improvements in standards of sanitation and medical care. Many diseases that proved fatal earlier have been conquered thus reducing death rates.
Mortality Rate
Mortality rate is a death rate in a population. There are many different types of mortality rates such as infant mortality rates, maternal mortality rates, and so on. Mortality rate is typically expressed per one thousand people in a population so a mortality rate of 8.5/1000 in a country having a population of 1000000 would mean 8500 deaths in a year, in that country. Infant mortality rate in a country is thus the number of infants dying within the first year of life per hundred live births.
What is the difference between Death Rate and Mortality Rate?
• Mortality rate is a death rate that tells us the number of deaths per thousand people in a country over a unit of time that is typically taken to be a year.
• Mortality is a fact that refers to susceptibility to death. While there is a crude death rate that refers to number of deaths in a population in a year, mortality rate is the number of deaths per thousand people over a period of time that is normally a year.
• There are many different types of mortality rates such as infant mortality rates, maternal mortality rates, and so on.