© REUTERS/Eddie Keogh
Chairs are pictured on top of tables in a classroom at Watlington Primary School during the last day of school, amid the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Watlington , Britain, July 17, 2020.
Keeping schools closed, as many teaching unions want, will cause more injuries and deaths to children and long-term damage to their educations. Yet the threat from Covid-19 to them - and to their teachers - is tiny.
Has the world ever been more frightened of something less frightening? For people aged seventy and above, who have underlying health problems, Covid-19 is something to be extremely concerned about.
For those under twenty, the risk of death is almost non-existent.
Since the start of the pandemic the total number of deaths in England and Wales of people under the age of twenty is... fourteen. With no additional deaths, at all, in the last month. Overall, this represents a
risk of death that is significantly less than one in a million.
Of course, each death in this age group is a tragedy. To lose a child is a terrible thing, and everyone would much rather that figure was zero. In reality a risk of less than one in a million is, effectively, zero.
In this age group, each and every year, significantly more children die of drowning, or car accidents, even homicide.
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