![]() ![]() The best way to stop deaths was to stop cases, went the thinking, which dovetailed naturally with every parent’s intuitive caution and desire to keep their kids healthy and uninfected - and distrust, perhaps, of anyone who suggested that your child would be fine if she got sick. ![]() In fact, for all the consternation that the United States responded to the pandemic by abandoning individuals to fend for themselves - a narrative belied by the data, which shows a roughly average level of stringency in our public response and a remarkably generous level of social-welfare spending, as Alex Tabarrok, among others, has noted - this principle of universal and shared burden has guided an enormous amount of our pandemic response: We have treated the disease almost as a uniform threat as a way of encouraging uniform vigilance. That’s because, in the depths of a pandemic as we were then, individuals are not just individuals but links in a chain of transmission, which is the main reason why, for much of the last 18 months, public-health officials have worried over infections in the young - assuming they would eventually help bring the disease back to those much more vulnerable. This summer, the calculations are very different than they were even last year, when the virus was still spreading wildly in an entirely unvaccinated population. Probably fewer were keeping them home entirely. But very few of them, two summers ago, were sending their children to parks and pools and camps in masks out of fear of pneumonia or flu. Risk is a tricky thing, the spread of the Delta variant and the complications of “long COVID” both real concerns, and all parents should assess their own comfort, and those of their children, in making plans and taking precautions. 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. But, last year, fewer kids died of COVID-19 than of heart disease, “malignant neoplasms,” suicide, and homicide - not to mention birth defects, which killed hundreds of times more. Some of these comparisons aren’t so neat, since the data on other diseases and accidents are sometimes unreliable, and because the extraordinary precautions against COVID-19 probably prevented significant additional spread (and also suppressed the spread of other diseases). In 2019, more than 2,000 American kids and teenagers died in car crashes each year, according to some estimates, about a thousand die from drowning. Only 331 of those deaths have been from COVID - less than half as many as have died of pneumonia. Over the course of the pandemic, 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes, according to the CDC. Now, thanks to vaccines, the vast majority of their parents and grandparents aren’t any longer, either.īut first: the kids. But the kids are not at risk themselves, and never were. 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. Yet for a year and a half we have been largely unwilling to fully believe it. ![]() 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. 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. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same. 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, according to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. Photo: Sarah Reingewirtz, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG ![]()
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