Picture the queue at North Shore's emergency department, the one where patients have been left waiting in soiled beds, as reported by RNZ. Somewhere in a queue like that, on any given day of the year, there is a child under five who has been seriously hurt. Not grazed. Seriously hurt: a fall, a burn, a drowning, a crash. The kind of injury that gets counted.

In 2021 there were 393 fatal and serious non-fatal injuries to New Zealand children aged 0 to 4 (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries). Divide that by 365 and you get more than one a day, every day, for a full year.

Here's the part that should stop you. That's the worst figure in 19 years. You have to go back to 2002, when the count was 411, to find a year that bad. And 2002 was on the way down from a much uglier era: 447 in 2000, 423 in 2001. The country spent the next two decades getting better at this. Then it stopped.

Look at the low point. In 2004 the number bottomed out at 306. It hovered in the 300s for years afterwards, dipping to 315 as recently as 2017. Across 2010 to 2017 the average sat around 340. Then 2018 hit 354. Then 387 in 2019. Then 387 again in 2020. Then 393.

Three consecutive years above 380. The last time that happened was 2000 to 2002, back when the entire national conversation about child safety looked different.

The 2020 figure deserves a moment on its own. That was the lockdown year. Fewer cars on the road, fewer playgrounds open, fewer trips anywhere. Serious injuries to under-fives did not fall. They stayed at 387, the same as the year before. Whatever is hurting our youngest children, a nationwide stay-at-home order didn't slow it down. If anything, it points the finger at the home itself.

Now hold that against today's other headline. The government is pushing ahead with a social media ban for under-16s, framed as protecting children from harm. Fair enough. Online harm is real and hard to measure. But we already have a harm register for kids that is precise, counted, and audited: the ACC and Stats NZ serious injury series. It has risen 25 percent since 2017. It has crept up quietly, a handful of children at a time.

To be fair to the long view, 393 is still well below the 447 of 2000. Two decades of car seats, pool fencing, hot water regulation and safe sleep campaigns bought real ground. Roughly 54 fewer children a year seriously hurt than at the start of the century. That's not nothing.

But we've handed back most of that gain in four years. A toddler who is badly burned or badly concussed enters exactly the health system described at North Shore this week. The injury number and the emergency department number are the same story, told at different ends.

One a day. That's the figure worth arguing about.