Major news articles this week have sounded the alarm this morning that small children are flooding the ICUs around the country. Louisiana is in dire straits, with 39 confirmed Covid pediatric hospitalizations across the entire state — wait a minute, really?
By Tatiana Prophet
Last Monday morning, ABC News, NPR and numerous other elite-friendly outlets hit us hard with their lead story: Children with Covid are being admitted to the ICU in droves. But if you look closely, the ABC7 article put out numbers of cases only, and not hospitalizations.
And where the anecdotal stories pierced us in the ribs, they pivot to numbers that don’t apply to the original anecdote.
Take this New York Times article, “The Delta Variant Is Sending More Children to the Hospital. Are They Sicker, Too?” The “lede” is a soft one, the kind that begins with someone’s name, signaling this will be an intimate look. They focus on Sophia Gomez, a healthy 12-year-old who got Covid-19 and developed pneumonia, whereupon she was hospitalized (she is home now). Pneumonia is a common progression of the disease. It merely means an infection of the air sacs in the lungs (i.e. the lower respiratory tract). In terms of Covid, it can occur in the vulnerable, or in healthy people if it is not treated early. In fact wh,en we first heard about the novel coronavirus, global health authorities referred to it as atypical pneumonia.
It turns out that the Times article does not answer its own question whether the Delta variant is making children sicker; and like most articles on Covid, the experts quoted always say the same thing: Covid is spreading, people are dying, and it’s the fault of the unvaccinated. Many of those experts also have conflicts of interest.
