And even after two years, why is finding anyone under 50 who died of Covid (and wasn’t profoundly obese or ill) so hard?
(NOTE: This is the full story for the headline I accidentally emailed yesterday.)
On Tuesday, the New York Times offered what feels like its 12-millionth sob story about Covid, the disease worse than all the others.
This time, the Times wrote about grandparents forced into raising their grandchildren following the Covid deaths of their own children.
As Families Grieve, Grandparents Step Up
Given the age distribution of Covid deaths, this take is particularly cynical. Drug overdoses and violence are far more likely to kill young parents.
Still, the Times dragged out a statistic from a group called Covid Collaborative, a “non-partisan group” (uh-huh) of “experts in public health” (you paid good money for those PhDs!) who want “to defeat the pandemic” (about that) and “sustainably and safety reopen the country” (“sustainably” is the giveaway they will be reaching DEEP into your pockets).
Anyway, the Times said that Covid Collaborative had reported in December that 167,000 children “had lost a parent or primary caregiver to the pandemic.”
Read that fast and it sounds like 167,000 parents died of Covid in 2020 and 2021. Which would be a lot.
Nope.
Here’s what the report actually said. First, the Covid Collaborators didn’t count parental deaths at all. They guessed how many people who died of Covid might have had children, based on national household surveys.
Ignore the fact that the number was simply an estimate, though. The report still didn’t say that 167,000 parents had died of Covid. It counted the number of children who had lost “parents, custodial grandparents, or other caregivers.”
The number of children who had a parent die was about 70,000, according to the report. But that figure doesn’t translate into 70,000 parents dying either. These were kids, not parents – meaning the death of a parent with five kids would pump the report by five deaths.
