In 1870, the average person born in the Philippines could expect to live to just under the age of 31 years old. This figure would remain unchanged until the early 1900s, when life expectancy would fall to just over 25 years in the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, as disruptions in food supply and healthcare would result in the loss of several hundred thousand Filipinos to famine and disease. This drop would be accompanied by another drop in the 1920s as the Spanish Flu would ravage the country. However, life expectancy would quickly recover and begin to rise under the United States military administration of the island, as investment by the American government would result in significant expansion in access to nutrition and healthcare. As a result, life expectancy would rise to over 41 years by 1940.

Life expectancy in the Philippines would decline once more in the 1940s, however, in the 1941 invasion and subsequent occupation of the island nation by the Empire of Japan in the Second World War, in which famine and causalities of war would result in the death of an estimated 500,000 Filipinos. Despite significant destruction in the Second World War, and an ending to the bulk of American investment in the country following its independence from the U.S. in 1946, life expectancy in the Philippines would quickly rise in the post-war years as the country would modernize; almost doubling in the two decades between 1945 and 1965 alone. It then plateaued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, during the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos, before the People Power Revolution in 1986 returned democracy to the country, and living standards began to improve once more. Life expectancy has also increased since this time, and in 2020, it is estimated that the average person born in the Philippines can expect to live to just over the age of 71 years old.

The child mortality rate in China, for children under the age of five, was 417 deaths per thousand births in 1850. This means that for all children born in 1850, almost 42 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday. Over the course of the next 170 years, this number has dropped drastically, and the rate has dropped to its lowest point ever in 2020 where it is just twelve deaths per thousand births. The sharpest decrease came between 1950 and 1955, as the Chinese Civil War ended, and the country began to recover from the Second World War. The decline then stopped between 1955 and 1965, due to famines caused by Chairman Mao Zedong's attempted Great Leap Forward, which was a failed attempt to industrialize China in the late twentieth century.

The child mortality rate in India, for children under the age of five, was 509 deaths per thousand births in 1880. This means that over half of all children born in 1880 did not survive past the age of five, and it remained this way until the twentieth century. From 1900 until today, the child mortality rate has fallen from over 53 percent in 1900, to under four percent in 2020. Since 1900, there were only two times where the child mortality rate increased in India, which were as a result of the Spanish Flu pandemic in the 1910s, and in the 1950s as India adjusted to its newfound independence.