Since the start of the pandemic, some media folk have continued to insist on making obscene comparisons between the number of Americans who have died with Covid and the number of Americans killed in various wars, as if it’s irrelevant whether one dies at age 80 or age 18. But there is one way in which Covid really is similar to combat. In both cases, aging policy makers demand disproportionate sacrifices from the young.
Fortunately children age 0 to 17 in the U.S. are always at comparatively low risk of death relative to their elders. When children have died in 2020 and 2021, the website of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in 99% of cases the kids have died from something other than Covid.