We also have to rate COVID’s danger to children against other dangers. In the United States, extraordinarily tiny fractions of children have died among the millions who have gotten sick. It’s true that this is not zero risk. But even these numbers may be serious exaggerations. CDC hasn’t investigated whether COVID was the cause or incidental to those deaths. Of the number who have been hospitalized, again, there is no investigation whether these children were hospitalized for or just with COVID. A Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report looking at CDC’s data estimates that up to 45.7 percent of these minors “were hospitalized for reasons that might not have been primarily related to COVID-19.” And even if we accept those numbers, they do not necessitate universal restrictive behaviors. For perspective, of children twelve years and younger, 636 died in car accidents in 2018. We do not treat this number as an emergency requiring us to upend the entire nation. Theoretically these also are preventable deaths, but trying to stop them all would require rules and enforcement mechanisms too invasive on the entire society.

Another theory is that children are a potential reservoir for the development of variants. But if COVID-19 is going endemic, then variants are going to be produced around the planet for years and possibly decades, and this process cannot be meaningfully altered by cloth masks on children in the United States.

We have to consider the possibility that as in many historical pandemics, people, even experts, are falling prey to an ancient superstition that other people’s children are especially toxic or dangerous.