Well this is extremely alarming:
For decades, advances in healthcare and safety steadily drove down death rates among American children. In an alarming reversal, rates have now risen to the highest level in nearly 15 years, particularly driven by homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides.
"Homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides." We're talking about children here, folks.
The Journal notes that "social disruption caused by the pandemic" drove increased rates of anxiety and depression — two syndromes pretty well corollated with substance abuse and suicide.
In other words, we took the kids out of schools, isolated them in their homes, shut down the world, and the kids responded in exactly the way you think they would.
And the numbers themselves are brutal:
Between 2019 and 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7%, and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year, according to an analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, published in JAMA in March. That's the highest increase for two consecutive years in the half-century that the government has publicly tracked such figures, according to Woolf's analysis.
These are hard figures to swallow, even more so when you think about how we did this to kids to protect them from a virus that has a vanishingly low statistical chance of seriously harming them. Disgraceful stuff from start to finish.
