The Murphy Administration tried to give its fear game a boost last week by reporting four alleged pediatric Covid-19 deaths since December 25th.
I say “alleged” for reasons that regular readers are very familiar with at this point, Save Jerseyans. New Jersey doesn’t differentiate between deaths because of Covid and with Covid (where the proximate cause was something else but the patient happened to test positive). We have no way of knowing why these children passed on which makes treating them as coronavirus victims more than a little unhelpful from a public policy perspective.
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The four deaths cited by New Jersey Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli included three babies and a child under 10.
New Jersey’s Covid-19 portal currently lists 12 deaths among minors – out of the state’s population of over 9 million souls – since the pandemic began in early 2020.
883 kids between 0 and 18 years ago have died “with” or “of” Covid-19 nationally over the two-year same period according to the CDC. The U.S. population was over 330 million as of the recent census. All of this means Covid-19 deaths among young Americans are about where flu deaths were in this age cohort for the 2019-2020 flu season.
Let’s put that in perspective. In December 2018, the New England Medical Journal released a survey of the 10 top causes of childhood death in the U.S. Over 4,000 died annually in motor vehicle crashes. Another 3,000+ died due to firearm-related injuries, 982 died from drug overdoses (or poisoning), and 995 drowned.
The number of national overdoses rose during the pandemic. Would anyone care to guess why?
It’s probably one of the many reasons why more people are speaking up. Last week, an infectious disease scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (where Fauci is the director) has come out against school mask mandates. There simply isn’t a known danger to justify a policy that can only do more harm than good at this stage, folks.
