According to an analysis of newly disclosed government figures by the Daily Wire, states who shuttered their schools for lengthy periods did not have a significantly lower percentage of COVID-related child mortality than states that did not.
Despite perhaps having the country’s most robust school coronavirus regulations, the District of Columbia had the highest number of child deaths from coronavirus per capita for the 2020-2021 school year (12 deaths, or 95 deaths per million pupils). Wyoming, which has almost the same population as the District of Columbia and whose schools remain open more frequently than any other state, has a lower death rate per capita (zero).
Wyoming was one of just three states that had yet to issue school closure orders for the remainder of the 2019-20 academic year by May of the following year (2020). The District of Columbia intended to prohibit students from returning to school this year if they were unvaccinated but ultimately postponed this requirement. Even the next school year, relatively few D.C. students attended many hours of in-person teaching.
The data indicate that, on a national scale, COVID was a relatively minor influence on child mortality; around 50 children per COVID-related death.
The preliminary CDC data on COVID deaths among children under 18 highlight the obvious policy blunder of Democratic-controlled areas that deprived children of an education and failed to achieve their mortality goals. Recent test results indicate that the shutdown had a catastrophic and long-lasting impact on pupils’ reading and arithmetic skills.
Teachers’ unions demonstrated with child-sized coffins on their autos, using the picture of mass death to secure their demands that schools be closed. Still, the low mortality statistics put doubt on their integrity.
In the last days of the 2022 election, teachers’ unions such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its president Randi Weingarten campaigned with Democratic politicians such as Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman, candidates for governor and senator in Pennsylvania, respectively. Meanwhile, the Atlantic magazine has advocated for “amnesty” for those who have made errors in their COVID policy suggestions.
Weingarten concurred with the magazine’s request to forget and forgive previous offenses. Nevertheless, according to Nicole Neily, the president of Parents Defending Education, educational decisions taken over the last several years will substantially affect the outcomes of the next elections. She noted that it is unlikely that parents will forgive or forget shortly since they are so concerned about the impact on their children.
The exact number of coronavirus-related fatalities was documented among Vermont’s youth in adjacent Wyoming. We cannot publish the actual number due to privacy concerns. However, 16 states reported a value between 1 and 9. It is noteworthy that Republican governors served in the majority of these states. The policy of these states on school attendance differed considerably, ranging from near-universal year-round school closures in Oregon to near-universal year-round school openings in South Dakota.
The Daily Wire used data from the COVID School Data Hub, which monitored the status of schools across the country, to calculate the percentage of time spent in person in each state; however, this average is not entirely accurate because decisions regarding distance education varied across school districts and grade levels. In addition, there are four missing states. According to data from The Daily Wire, there is little association between the official school shutdown policy and the yearly child fatality rate.
Between January 2020 and last month, there were 763 COVID-related fatalities among children aged 5 to 17, according to official government statistics. Approximately 2% of the 32,101 children who died during that time were infants. There were 137 deaths from influenza and 232 deaths from pneumonia, but none from COVID. According to a second CDC data set, several young people who were classed as having died from COVID were diagnosed with COVID but died of other causes, such as accidents or heart failure.
The CDC director under the Biden administration, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, acknowledged this fact when she stated that teachers should be given priority for vaccines because they should be “protected from contracting COVID-19 in places outside of schools where they may be at a higher risk.”