Just over 153,000 Americans have been recorded as having died from the coronavirus – and fewer than 200 of them were below the age of 25.
In the most recent week of data available, a total of 408 people between the ages of 15 and 24 died in the U.S., 5 of which were from the coronavirus. For the 5-14 age range the figures were 53 total deaths, zero from coronavirus.
While teachers unions and Democrats are heavily protesting reopening schools, the consensus among the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and even Bill Gates is that they should reopen (whom I chose to quote because perhaps liberal will listen to them). When it comes to the risks children face at school, there are already far greater public health risks children face that we don’t keep schools closed for, and the disparity in potential harm isn’t even close.
According to an analysis from Unbiased America:
During the 2018-19 flu season, 21,012 of the 53.6 million children aged 5-17 in the United States required hospitalization because of the flu. That equates to a hospitalization rate of 39.2 per 100,000. COVID-19, meanwhile, has resulted in the hospitalization of 5.8 per 100,000 children aged 5-17.
The flu also results in far more deaths in the 5 to 17 age bracket than COVID-19. Approximately 0.4 out of every 100,000 children aged 5 to 17 died of the flu during the 2018-19 flu season, four times higher than for COVID.
None of which is to minimize death and illness, but instead to show that we’ve been sending our children to school (and sports, and birthday parties, and to friend’s houses) every year despite the risk of infectious disease (and vehicle accidents, and sports injuries, and other small-risk but highly publicized dangers)…
What about the risk to teachers? According to the CDC, mortality rate for the flu is 1.8 per 100,000 people age 18-49 (the CDC doesn’t break out the flu rates into smaller age segments, so exact comparisons to COVID are not possible). For COVID, it’s 0.4 for ages 15-24, 2.0 for ages 25-34, 5.7 for ages 35-44. For the flu, the mortality rate is 9.0 for ages 50-64, while for COVID, it’s 16.2 for age 45-54.
With the flu that dangerous to children relative to coronavirus, hopefully some liberal out there doesn’t interpret this as evidence to keep schools closed forever.
