Even with the rise of the more transmissible delta variant, the coronavirus hasn’t proven any more fatal, especially not to the children and babies who have been largely spared by the pandemic.
To date, just 385 deaths involving minors, out of the total 54,062 that occurred in 2020 and 2021, resulted from the coronavirus. That’s 0.7% of all child deaths. And even of the more than 100,000 deaths in this period among adults ages 18 to 29, only 2,761 resulted from coronavirus.
Still, young people have not been spared by the increased mortality of the pandemic era. Heedless of the stunning implications of lockdowns and school closures on youth mental health, the nation’s unelected bureaucracy has directly caused a staggering spike in childhood obesity, the magnitude of which could easily kill many more children than the pandemic itself.
Using data from Kaiser Permanente Southern California, a new JAMA study found that weight gain among children has skyrocketed since the pandemic began. Whereas body mass index among children aged 5 through 11 increased by just 0.15 in an 11-month period before the pandemic, it increased by 1.72 from last March to this January. All in all, the share of children that age who qualify as overweight or obese soared from a little more than one-third before the pandemic to nearly half by the beginning of this year.
The share of adolescents ages 12 through 15 who qualify as overweight or obese increased from 39% pre-pandemic to 43% by January, and the share of teenagers aged 16 and 17 increased from 36.5% to 38.2%.
Every one of the 385 coronavirus deaths among minors is a tragedy for which China’s government should be held accountable. But we could have avoided many of the thousands if not millions of deaths that will result from sacrificing children’s health to satisfy teachers unions and protect Boomers.
We don’t know the long-term effects of the virus, though the early lack of “long COVID” among young people already proves promising. But we know the plethora of proven facts about childhood obesity’s long-term implications for overall mortality. Just as one example, a Swedish study of more than 41,000 subjects found that adults who suffered childhood obesity had three times higher risk of mortality in early adulthood than the average population. A 2015 meta-analysis found that one-fifth of all adult cancers, future hypertension, and future coronary heart disease cases occurred in those who were obese as children, and nearly a third of future diabetes cases did so as well. Obesity itself is a major risk factor in half of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States, including the coronavirus.
Free coronavirus vaccines are now available to everyone over age 12, including the Pfizer vaccine that is now fully authorized by the FDA. Although our regulatory bureaucracy has been sluggish about authorizing the vaccine for children, minors, especially those not obese or overweight, remain overwhelmingly safe from hospitalization or death as a result of the virus. Young children who attend school are still not significant vectors of the pandemic’s transmission.
The best way to protect those with the greatest risk of death from the coronavirus remains mass vaccination. To sacrifice a third year of normal schooling, extracurriculars, and socialization, apparently all for the sake of the unvaccinated, will result in a great many more deaths of children in the future than the lives it will save now. That’s not a moral bargain, and it’s surely not following science. Putting children first means returning them to normalcy instead of letting them eat their way to an early grave in solitude behind a Zoom screen.
