A child born today has half the risk of dying before their fifth birthday compared with a child born in 1990, the baseline of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), when 12·2 million children died, now reduced to 6·3 million (95% uncertainty interval 6·0—6·6 million).1 In The Lancet, Haidong Wang and colleagues1 from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) present complex analyses, the most detailed attempt yet to attribute change and predict the future post-2015 for child survival.