The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that three out of every four children have been infected with COVID-19, giving us yet another reference point to show that the panicked liberals who imposed restrictions on children were being cruelly overcautious.
There are roughly 73 million children in the United States. Using the CDC’s estimate, that would mean roughly 54,750,000 children have had COVID in the last two years. According to CDC data, there have been 1,017 children who died from COVID or were presumed to have had COVID. The CDC’s hospitalization tracker, which covers 10% of the population, has recorded 8,053 child hospitalizations with COVID. Extrapolated out, that would total 80,530 hospitalizations.
Using these numbers, that would mean 0.14% of children who had COVID were hospitalized — the CDC calls these “COVID-19-associated” hospitalizations — and that 0.001% of children who had COVID died.
All of those deaths were tragic but statistically minuscule. It was clear since early in the pandemic that children were at the lowest risk from COVID. It was clear, based on data, that children are more at risk from the flu than they are from COVID. It was also clear that children need to be in school in person and that closing down playgrounds, filling skate parks with sand, and canceling youth sports leagues would not help keep children safe. Indeed, all those things would hurt children’s emotional, social, and intellectual development.
But panicked liberals insisted that children be punished during COVID so adults could feel safe. Politicians and bureaucrats kept restrictions on schools and other children’s activities long after mask mandates or vaccine mandates for adults were lifted. New York City is still mandating masks for preschoolers, in defiance of science, data, and basic human empathy. Health bureaucrats and (primarily) Democratic politicians placed children last at every turn, all to placate people who panicked over every single COVID case — even after they were able to get vaccinated.
Every single person who pushed remote “learning,” mask mandates, and other restrictions on children should never be let near power again. The politicians who made those decisions should be run out of office, and the health bureaucrats to whom they deferred should have their desks cleaned out. They were not simply wrong: They ignored data, willfully or otherwise. There was no excuse for it in the summer of 2020, let alone the months and years that followed.
