August 7th 2020

By Hunter

Daily Kos

ABC News obtained an internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that shows non-white American children who contract COVID-19 are dying at a higher rate than white American children.

"Nationwide, the number of COVID-19 cases among people under the age of 18 from March 1 to Aug. 3 were 40% Hispanic, 34% white and 19% Black. The ethnicity breakdown of those patients who died from the disease is 38% Hispanic, 34% Black and 25% white, according to the memo." The numbers also show that boys are more likely to die than girls, and by roughly a 2-to-1 margin.

Both of these could be largely inferred from the statistics on American adults, but it is still grim to see it laid out in numbers. For still-unexplained reasons, infections appear to be disproportionally more severe among men than women. The elevated risk to Black American children, however, is almost certainly due to the disparity of health services in counties with higher numbers of Black Americans, part of the continued segregation of services that continues to place those communities at higher risk of poor health. Black Americans are being left out of pandemic relief efforts despite living in communities with poorer pandemic response capabilities to begin with; it is unforgivable, just as so many other aspects of our failed pandemic response are unforgivable.

The pandemic deaths of American children have yet to be so much as acknowledged by the Trump "administration." Donald Trump himself on Wednesday insisted that children are "almost immune" to the virus, a lie that Trump and allied political figures have told repeatedly as justification for reopening American schools. Schools that are reopening are, as expected, immediately finding new cases. In coming weeks some of those exposed children will, the statistics show us, die.

Posted with permission