A Retrospective Accounting of Pediatric Covid Alarmism

How Healthcare Reporters used Sensationalist Reporting to Create Inaccurate Narratives

Throughout the pandemic, there seemed to be constant versions of the same story over and over again: “Hospitals Overwhelmed!” To whatever extent it might have been true for certain areas of the country during peaks of Sars-Cov2 waves, and whether or not those surges were more overwhelming than previous “overwhelms” from Flu, remains to be investigated, as we have not been tracking hospitalizations for Flu and for Covid in the same way, and we never really had a real time, nationally tracked healthcare capacity till the pandemic.

That being said, one thing became incredibly clear very early on: the burden of disease on children, and the burden of SARS-COV2 positive pediatrics on hospital resources was never a threat or ever even a major driver of pediatric hospitalizations. This fact did not stop opportunistic healthcare reporters and others in media from crafting panic narratives that were completely out of step with reality. Throughout the Delta wave in Summer 2021, the Omicron wave in 2021/22, there are countless examples of stories laced with anecdotes, alarmist projections completely detached from real world data, and sometimes outright false claims.

For this post I’m going to do something different and keep this as a work in progress, and add additional examples as I find them. I’m going to use data from the Tennessee Department of Health, who recently opened up a data set called the Healthcare resource tracking System (that was previously not available to the public), to retroactively fact-check these stories and compare with what was actually happening.

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Example 1:

WPLN Nashville

“Through the roof” ? Wow- sounds pretty bad, but what does the data show for pediatric hospitalizations for August 23, 2021?