A 6-year-old girl is now the youngest person to die of COVID-19 in Florida - CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-florida-6-year-old-girl-youngest-death/

Before Friday's announcement, the state's youngest death was a 9-year-old girl with no known underlying health conditions in Putnam County in July. The other child deaths were an 11-year-old girl in Broward County, an 11-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl in Dade County...

... a 16-year-old girl in Lee County, a 17-year-old boy in Manatee County and a 17-year-old boy in Pasco County.

Since March, 47,489 Florida residents under the age of 18 have tested positive for the virus. Nearly 600 of those patients were hospitalized.

More than 7,000 positive cases among children occurred in the last two weeks alone.

This is just Florida, mind you - a state that is underreporting by many accounts. This puts the percentage of kids needing to be hospitalized for covid at roughly 1.5 percent (15 kids per 1,000), compared to national averages of 1.5 kids per 1,000 needing hospitalization for flu.

Now look at your local schools. How many students are there? In our town, there’s about 100 kids, give or take, per grade. Following Florida’s record, we could expect 1-2 students per grade needing to be hospitalized if they all caught this. This is not the flu, it’s never been.

People are so used to reading statistics without personalizing them that we forget what these numbers really mean. Look around the rest of the globe - no other developed country would accept these numbers. We are being made to feel this is inevitable. It wasn’t.

Last tweet in this thread that I’m not sure anyone will even see: I teach in MA, where the now infamous Biogen meeting triggered our state’s disastrous April spike. It spread like wildfire through metro west area families those few weeks before the state closed schools down.