Leftwing New York Magazine Admits That Children Have Never Been Threatened By Covid, and That We've Known This From the Earliest Days of the Pandemic

To add my bit: the entire scare was manufactured by teachers to protect them, not children, and to let them stay home like white collar workers were.

And also, there was a lot of virtue-signaling covid Karen one-upsmanship in the mix.

The kids are safe. They always have been.

It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same.

This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic -- indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease. The preliminary mortality data from China was very clear: To children, COVID-19 represented only a vanishingly tiny threat of death, hospitalization, or severe disease.

Yet for a year and a half we have been largely unwilling to fully believe it. Children now wear masks at little-league games, and at the swimming pool, and when school reopens in the fall they will likely wear masks there, too. But the kids are not at risk themselves, and never were. Now, thanks to vaccines, the vast majority of their parents and grandparents aren't any longer, either.

But first: the kids. Over the course of the pandemic, 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes, according to the CDC. Only 331 of those deaths have been from COVID -- less than half as many as have died of pneumonia. In 2019, more than 2,000 American kids and teenagers died in car crashes; each year about a thousand die from drowning. More American children die in an average year from RSV -- another respiratory ailment, whose prevalence is now growing because 18 months of quarantine have deprived young children of immune exposure -- than died in either of the last two years from COVID-19.

Some of these comparisons aren't so neat, since the extraordinary precautions against COVID-19 prevented significant additional spread (and also suppressed the spread of other diseases). But, last year, fewer kids died of COVID-19 than of heart disease, "malignant neopolasms," suicide, and homicide -- not to mention birth defects, which killed hundreds of times more. All told, 600,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID over the course of the pandemic; just 0.05 percent of those were under the age of 18, a population that represents more than 20 percent of the country's population as a whole.

I guess the leftwing chattering classes are getting sick of having to stay home with their kids.

posted by Ace at 12:14 PM

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