Of course children can and will catch Covid. The point is that child fatalities - as well as double vaccinated fatalities - are low.
Not much comfort if yours is one of the unvaccinated kids though. Or if your kid is the vector by which it reaches a vulnerable person at home. Vulnerable people can still die even if double vaccinated.
They call these "breakthrough cases".
"Breakthrough cases" are where infection has occurred in someone who is fully vaccinated, whereas we define a "breakthrough death" as a death involving COVID-19 that occurred in someone who had received both vaccine doses and had a first positive PCR test at least 14 days after the second vaccination dose; in total, there were 256 breakthrough deaths between 2 January and 2 July 2021.
It's all odds though isn't it? 51,281 deaths, 256 of which were breakthrough deaths.
Last week the most positivity - the highest number of positive cases - was in the secondary school age bracket. But under the age of 18 deaths remain ' statistically insignificant' - 0.1 to 0.5 compared with almost 8,000 in the over 80's. It's single digits.
But every death shatters the lives of those it touches.
Maybe we are all peasants, our lives meaningless, our deaths already factored in as a coefficient of NICE and the cost of keeping us alive. "But they are only kids and you can make more?" has been a cry of heartless capitalism for untold generations.
And make no mistake. We are the lucky ones.
We will never beat Covid until the world is vaccinated. And again, every year. And again and again and again.
This is our future now. One where we are both cost and benefit. And government stopped being bi-partisan about that some time ago.
Brown talks eloquently about the loss of the £20 'uplift' to benefit this month in the Guardian today. I wish beyond wishing that any of the current Labour leadership had one iota of his gravitas. "Go back to your sunbed?" was that really the best we can do when millions are about to be plunged into poverty?
And I wish beyond wishing that Brown had not been so determined to fall on his sword and usher in the Etonian Age. That he had done his own deal with the Lib Dems.
A parallel history, that would have left us all better off.
(we'd still be here though, wouldn't we?)