Alyssa Rosenberg has a piece out this week about the “shockingly low” vaccination numbers for young children. What she misses is the far bigger issue of COVID bureaucracy.
Rosenberg’s story is good and worth reading in full. She talks about wanting to get her children vaccinated. I have no opinion on the merits of vaccinating children from COVID, but I am not a parent. Plenty of parents don’t want their children vaccinated. Rosenberg is speaking for the parents who do. She is not lecturing other parents, and she understands that “our reasoning won’t address everyone’s concerns.” She is simply explaining the thought process behind her decision.
But in her piece about the decisions parents like her are making, she inadvertently highlights a far bigger issue: the torments the COVID bureaucracy has foisted on children. “Vaccinating my daughter protected her as much from bureaucracy as from illness,” Rosenberg writes. She details the policy for her preschool class, which requires unvaccinated children to stay home if anyone in the class tests positive, requiring them to test five consecutive days before they can return.
“It’s better for her and for us to test her and send her to school rather than keep her in quarantine every time one of her friends or teachers tests positive,” Rosenberg says. “But we decided it was even better to subject her to three jabs in the arm than to an endless round of sticks up her nose.”
The issue here, of course, is that these strict testing and quarantine regimes for children should not exist, especially for preschoolers like Rosenberg’s daughter. Children, statistically, are not at any serious risk from COVID. Throughout the pandemic, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have shown that children are at more risk of hospitalization or death from the flu than they are from COVID, yet we have not burdened children with weeklong quarantines or stringent testing.
Using CDC estimates from April (and a little bit of math), we could determine that 0.14% of children who contracted COVID were hospitalized. It is important to note that not all of these children were hospitalized because of COVID; many simply tested positive upon arriving at the hospital. Using those CDC estimates, we know that roughly 0.001% of children who contracted COVID died.
For many, particularly the elderly, the worst part of the pandemic has been the fear of a serious case of COVID. Statistically, this fear has been completely unwarranted for children, yet the COVID bureaucracy came down on them harder than any other age group. It is one of the worst abuses of power from the pandemic, and it is made all the worse by the fact that it is still going on in pockets of the country.
