The media are doing the best they can to scare parents into believing their children are suddenly very at-risk for the coronavirus, but the available information confirms most of this is baseless fearmongering.
Headline after headline this past week has highlighted the rising number of admissions in pediatric hospitals to suggest that the delta variant poses a bigger threat to children than the original COVID-19 strain. But a deeper dive into these reports shows they’re backed by lots of anecdotes and very little actual scientific evidence.
Take, for example, this Atlantic article, titled “Delta is Bad News for Kids.” The report includes a few statistics that show coronavirus cases are rising among children, but it fails to note immediately that death rates among children have risen along with them. This is a very important point because it shows that even if children do contract the virus, they are still very, very, very unlikely to fall seriously ill from it. Indeed, of the 40,396 children under the age of 11 who died since January 2020, only 197 died after testing positive for the coronavirus. That’s less than one-half of 1%. More children under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018-2019 flu season than children who died of COVID-19.
The number of coronavirus deaths among children would probably be even lower if we were able to distinguish between the children who died because of COVID-19 and the children who died with it. This distinction is crucial. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that not all of the children recently hospitalized with the coronavirus were in the hospital for COVID-19. Many of the hospitalized children have underlying conditions that make them more susceptible to the virus and its effects, making them outliers.
The Atlantic writer goes on to quote frustrated parents and pediatricians, which is fine, but well-meaning concern is not data. It’s just concern. And none of it is justified.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal notes that as of July 31, the rate at which children were being hospitalized with the coronavirus nationally was 0.5 per 100,000, according to data from the CDC, which amounts to roughly 250 patients. And, again, it is not clear how many of these patients were admitted for the coronavirus.
However, we do know that many of the children being hospitalized with the delta variant have also contracted another more dangerous virus called RSV. One pediatric hospital in Louisiana said it has been operating at full capacity since early June, well before the delta variant began to surge, because of RSV infections. And in Texas, a pediatric hospital reported that of the 45 COVID-19 hospitalizations they’ve received, 25 had both RSV and COVID-19. What this confirms is that children can still get sick (sometimes seriously sick) but rarely, if ever, from the coronavirus.
Here’s some more data that Allahpundit highlighted over at Hot Air: The L.A. Unified School District tested students who participated in its summer school program from the end of June through mid-July and found that out of the 44,000 children who attended, only 174 ended up testing positive for the coronavirus at some point. And only 12 of those infections were the result of in-school transmission, meaning they likely contracted the virus somewhere else first.
The same data can be found in New York City, which also tested its summer school students, and found that as the delta variant spread, only 0.2% of children caught the virus.
This is the evidence that matters. Yes, there will be exceptions, as with every single illness. But the statistics prove that children are remarkably safe from contracting a serious case of COVID-19. And until that changes, parents don’t need to worry, and media outlets need to stop worrying them.
