To all those who are being sarcastic, unkind and think their put downs of the op are clever... this is from a post titled.... 'Please do not send your children to school if you can possibly help it.'
I'm writing this to you from the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where our schools have closed.
I wrote part of this in another thread, but I want very badly for you to see this.
In the United States, about 30 per 100,000 children in the age range 10-19 die every year. I imagine it's a bit less in the UK. That's from ALL causes, from suicide to car accidents to pediatric cancers.
If .2%, or 2 in 1000, children 10-19 die from this, that's 200 out of every 100,000.
This means even if only 20% of the population gets this virus, it will kill more 10-19 year olds this year than ALL OTHER CAUSES OF DEATH COMBINED.
More than all the rest combined. And that's with only 20% infected. If it's 60%...
Many more old people will die from this than young people. But there is no age category for which this is not, at least according to current evidence, more deadly than all-causes death for a given year in a developed nation.
You can say "hardly any children will die," but would you say "oh, let your child go to the party with drinking, hardly any teenagers die on average in a year, just a few in 100,000!" or "well, so few kids get cancer, it's not worth getting my kid checked out with these weird symptoms," or "almost no one gets kidnapped, really, may as well not even talk about stranger danger with my kids."
This is more dangerous than every murderer and every misplaced weapon, this year. More dangerous than every drunk driver. More dangerous than every overdose and every eating disorder.
I know not everyone has options. That is manifestly clear in the US, and it's destroying people to stay home in some cases.
But this is the level of risk you're exposing your child to by sending them, a risk that some people are taking willingly not because they must, but because they're worried their child will be lonely, bored, or marked as truant.
We take precautions for our children every day. We inconvenience ourselves for their safety every day, for situations that will kill far fewer children every year than this disease. If you wouldn't walk away from a toddler in the bath, and you wouldn't let your teenager get in a drunk driver's car, it's worth going out of your way to help your child avoid this.
It's hard to understand the cold, hard math of population-level, actuarial death probability and risk assessment. In this case, if your sense of danger is telling you to keep your kid away, it's right. Listen to it.