It’s official. Children are less at risk of serious illness from COVID than literally any other ailment that afflicts them, yet they are the last people our government is setting free from the clutches of COVID tyranny. We have always known that children tend to get less sick from COVID than from a seasonal flu. But two new studies from California demonstrate that the risk is even lower than previously thought.

Yesterday, New York magazine published a story highlighting new studies showing that the pediatric hospitalization numbers for COVID have likely been dramatically inflated throughout the country. The first study, published in the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was conducted by Stanford researchers and examined 117 reputed COVID hospitalizations among those under 18 at a children’s hospital in Northern California. They found that just 7.7% exhibited severe illness and 12.8% critical illness. Overall, 45% were classified as “unlikely to be caused by SARSCoV2,” and it appears that most of the others weren’t suffering life-threatening illness.

The second study, published in the same journal, found in America’s fifth-largest hospital that, among patients younger than 22, 40% had “incidental infection,” only 47% were “potentially symptomatic,” and just 14% were “significantly symptomatic.” They further found that “Fifty-five percent of incidental and 47% of potentially symptomatic patients had at least one identified comorbidity, while 90% of significantly symptomatic patients had at least one.”

As Drs. Monica Gandhi and Amy Beck wrote in a commentary for Hospital Pediatrics that accompanied the two studies, “Taken together, these studies underscore the importance of clearly distinguishing between children hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 found on universal testing versus those hospitalized for COVID-19 disease.” They further conclude that the data also “greatly overestimate the true burden of COVID-19 disease in children.”

If so many of the pediatric hospitalizations are wrongly ascribed to COVID, then how many of the already very few pediatric COVID deaths are also among individuals who died with COVID, not because of it? The CDC has already stated based on an analysis of death certificates that 35.2% of all reputed pediatric COVID deaths “could not be plausibly categorized as either a chain-of-event or significant contributing condition.”

Yet, appallingly, so many schools are still requiring children to remain masked until they get an experimental vaccine that can only potentially harm them and not help them.

**By Daniel Horowitz