Nearly one million American children were infected with COVID-19 last week

Nearly one million American children were infected with COVID-19 last week, according to statistics released Tuesday by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The 981,488 new pediatric cases break previous records. That’s four times the number recorded during last year’s winter peak, three times the number of new cases recorded two weeks earlier, and a 69 percent increase from the week ending May 6. January, when the number of cases jumped by 580,000.

The exponential jump in pediatric cases was accompanied by almost 2,000 new child hospitalizations last week, double the growth in the number of children fighting for their lives in hospital beds compared to the week former. As pupils were forced back into schools after the Christmas holidays, cases soared, as expected, but the unprecedented scale of the situation is bringing disaster systems to a halt. nationwide health. In just two weeks, the United States has seen 11 percent of all pediatric COVID-19 infections to date.

The death of a child is the most unspeakable horror, a horror that now strikes many American families every day. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the total number of pediatric deaths now stands at 1,127, while the AAP puts the figure significantly lower at 762. Data from the CDC and the AAPs are suffering from the willful lack of reporting from state and local health departments and the refusal of the Biden government to make these numbers mandatory.

In response to the horrific reality they face in overcrowded and poorly ventilated schools that are now hotbeds of infection, students have organized themselves to try to save their lives and those of their families, teachers and their community by walking out across the United States, from New York to Chicago, from Boston to Oakland and Redondo Beach, California, over the past week.

As a result of the remote work action led by brave Chicago teachers, more and more educators are demanding the closure of unsafe schools and creating Educator Safety Committees across the country. More and more of them want to break the shackles of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Association of Educators (NEA), which demand passive compliance with the Biden government’s school reopening policies.

Among the children whose lives were prematurely cut short last week was 17-year-old Taigan Bradford. A senior at Kalamazoo Central High School, she died on Tuesday, January 11, after a nearly two-month battle with COVID-19. Taigan had planned to enroll at Kalamazoo Valley Community College to become a nurse after graduating.

After his death, Taigan’s mother urged the district to close the buildings and return to concurrent virtual learning. She told local outlet MLive that her daughter often tells her about other students who don’t wear their masks properly at school or on the bus. Bradford pointed out that schools cannot track the number of positive cases or properly maintain building cleanliness. Kalamazoo Public Schools reported 64 new cases among students and 13 cases among staff on January 17, bringing the total number of cases to 875.

In South Dakota, a second child has died of COVID-19 in the past two weeks. A boy aged zero to nine from Minnehaha County died on Tuesday, January 18. The previous week, a baby less than a year old from Pennington County died. The state has only recorded 27 cases of Omicron, but has already lost two young children.

Not only is there chronic underreporting of cases and deaths across the United States, but those deaths are often not recognized until weeks or months later. Among the cases reported last week was the October death of a Houston child, listed as “under 10” and the city’s youngest victim of the virus. She is one of 4,000 Houston residents who have died of COVID-19.