I’ve said it before, but will repeat myself: what we have done to our children and young people, in the name of protecting the oldest and sickest in our population, is a crime. We have known for a long time that covid is not dangerous to children, yet they have suffered more than anyone else from the irrational lockdowns that one government after another has imposed. Even today, it is hard to get kids back in school in some areas, and in many it is impossible without requiring masks.
Recent studies out of the U.K. reveal how little children ever had to fear from covid, while at the same documenting the devastating effects of shutdowns on their lives. The Telegraph reports:
Covid killed just six healthy children during the pandemic, while lockdowns have fuelled a timebomb of health disorders among the young, new data showed.
The research examining more than 3,000 deaths of under-18s in England in the year since the first lockdown found a “tiny” proportion were linked to Covid.
Just 25 deaths were caused by the virus, and only six of those involved children without underlying conditions.
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[I]f a child tests positive for the virus, they have a 99.995 per cent chance of surviving.
In any population of tens or hundreds of millions of people, some are going to die. And British children have died, just not from covid:
The same year saw more than 1,100 heart deaths among children, along with almost 1,200 fatalities linked to neurological conditions and more than 450 deaths among under-18s with respiratory conditions, according to research published in the journal Nature Medicine.
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Separate data show that on average, about 900 children die annually from infectious diseases, with about 90 deaths from flu or pneumonia among children in 2019 in England.
So covid posed an insignificant threat, at worst, to British children, or those in other countries. The effects of government-imposed shutdowns, on the other hand, were devastating:
Meanwhile, a separate study from the University of Oxford showed a 17 per cent fall in diagnoses of childhood cancers in the months following the first lockdown.
Researchers found that those diagnosed [with cancer] during the pandemic were twice as likely to be admitted to intensive care before diagnosis, suggesting that the disease was more advanced, when survival chances are worse.
In addition, “alarming” NHS statistics showed that the number of children waiting for treatment for eating disorders has doubled in the past year. The official figures showed more than 2,000 children and young people waiting for treatment in September 2021, up from 860 in a year.
Experts said that the slew of data painted a devastating picture of the long-term harm inflicted on children and the problems being stored up for the future.
It is too bad when already-sick people in their 80s and 90s are pushed over the edge by covid. But what we have done to our children in response to the epidemic is a disgrace.
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