A time of social cowardice
The opening of the abstract of new study published in Science, COVID-19 in children and young people, Children have a low risk of COVID-19 and are disproportionately harmed by precautions. (Emphasis mine)
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has brought distinct challenges to the care of children and adolescents globally. Unusually for a respiratory viral infection, children and adolescents are at much lower risk from symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) than any other age group. The near-global closure of schools in response to the pandemic reflected the reasonable expectation from previous respiratory virus outbreaks that children would be a key component of the transmission chain. However, emerging evidence suggests that this is most likely not the case. A minority of children experience a postinfectious inflammatory syndrome, the pathology and long-term outcomes of which are poorly understood. However, relative to their risk of contracting disease, children and adolescents have been disproportionately affected by lockdown measures, and advocates of child health need to ensure that children’s rights to health and social care, mental health support, and education are protected throughout subsequent pandemic waves.
The entire article is well worth reading, especially if you have children, or care about future generations. I will quote more from the study but first a little background. The CVC recently put out another of their COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios, in which they updated the estimated infection fatality rate, by age group.
0-19 years: 0.00003
20-49 years: 0.0002
50-69 years: 0.005
70+ years: 0.054
Since globally we have had over 980,000 deaths involving almost 32.5 million known infections, we can safely say that these numbers are beginning to more accurately represent reality, though they may still be to high. To put these numbers in more relevant terms, this is the CDC's best estimate for persons in these age groups surviving covid-19 if they contract it.
0-19 years: 99.997%
20-49 years: 99.98%
50-69 years: 99.5%
70+ years: 94.6%
As you can see the chances of dying from Covid-19, in any age group is rather low, but among school age children it is almost non-existent. To put this in further perspective, there are currently 81,720,000 American children under the age of 20. If everyone of them were in infected with the virus, according to the CDC, 2,452 of them would succumb to the disease. These figures do not make a distinction dependent on the health of the person when contracting the virus, these are the percentages for the entire population, so obviously healthy individuals of any age are at much lower risk than these figures show.
If the dea of closing schools is to "slow the spread" of the virus, current policies in much of the nation makes little sense. I read recently of a teacher who was in line at a local store and when she reached the cashier it was one of her students. The student asked her why they were not opening the high school. The teacher replied that it was for their safety. The young cashier pointed out that there were twenty high school students working at the store she and thousands of others shopped in. As the Science article points out:
...it is inevitable that there will be students attending school while infected with SARS-CoV-2, and likely there will be some school outbreaks, with the frequency of these events reflecting levels of community transmission. Regardless, it is hard to support the opening of retail and hospitality sectors while schools remain shut, as occurred in many countries earlier this year.
The Science article explains all the negative impacts on children due to the "new normal" of limiting children, from in class schooling. The negative impacts range from lowering educational efficiency for a generation of children to increased teen suicide and lower vaccine rates for other diseases.
The fall back argument seems to be that we must close schools to slow the spread of the disease and to protect teachers and older generations. I would point out that, in the past, it has always been society's responsibility to protect its youth, not youth's responsibility to protect their elders. The idea that we must knowingly and deliberately diminish if not destroy our children's future in order to protect a tiny fraction of society is not only repugnant, it is social cowardice.
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