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Children are particularly hard hit by the pandemic.
Photo: Flashpop / Getty Images
This pandemic has deepened existing inequalities in society and created new ones. Most of those who had a secure job - also thanks to government measures, in particular the short-time work allowance - got through the crisis well in economic terms, others lost their jobs and their economic existence, sometimes built up over decades, was destroyed. Three sectors are particularly affected: gastronomy, hotel and culture. Artists feel marginalized, many of them despair. This also applies to many who have become unemployed and the self-employed who have lost their company.
Children and adolescents are also among those particularly affected by the pandemic. They are dependent on their peers. They cannot develop their personality well without exchanging ideas, playing games and new experiences. Young people who break away from their parents' house were forced to stop this process, and even to reverse it, for months. An entire generation has been locked out of day care centers, kindergartens, schools and universities with a few interruptions since last spring. Families came under massive mental stress. The percentage of those suffering from depression has increased massively.
The damage caused by this pandemic, which is now - hopefully - in its final phase thanks to vaccines made available quickly, also includes the widespread lack of respect and mutual recognition. The civil culture of democracy, the way we treat one another, has clearly suffered. It will take effort and time to heal the wounds on the social body.
Whether and in what time this will be possible also depends on how we cope with these final months of the pandemic. At the moment, nerves are strained because the success of the vaccination campaign has added new inequalities. Those who have gone through Covid 19 disease, including those who have been vaccinated, can exercise their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms again, as the justifications for their restrictions no longer exist. Due to the prioritization of the vaccination campaign, the younger cohorts were expected to stand back out of solidarity for the older ones.
Even if this prioritization was not consistently maintained right from the start and what has been referred to in the public discussion as the “vaccination urge” contributed to the fact that many of the particularly vulnerable are not protected by vaccination to this day, there is a clear unequal distribution of the Vaccinated across the age groups. The justification for this unequal distribution is the unequal health risk associated with a Covid-19 infection, which correlates very strongly with age. Much stronger than this e.g. B. was the case with the Spanish flu. In numbers: The probability of dying from Covid-19 if you are infected is 0.003 percent for those under 35. This risk will increase twentyfold in the next decade,becomes 200 times as high in the 55 to 65 age group and then increases to two thousand times in the 75 to 85 age group. This, the noticeably close connection between age and health risk, was the reason for vaccinating the very old first, but also for prioritizing people with specific previous illnesses.
A fair distribution of resources in such a case is not equal distribution, but their use depending on the individual risk. As long as the vaccine is scarce, i.e. there are far more people who want to be vaccinated than there is vaccine available, vaccinating those who only bear one hundredth or one thousandth of the health risk of others means an injustice to the vulnerable. The longer the scarcity persists, the more difficult it is to endure this risk-ethical insight. In fact, politicians have already given in to the pressure in various ways and softened the prioritization, partly for pragmatic reasons, because the vaccination centers acted too clumsily,partly because some vaccines suffered from a lack of acceptance anyway and can now be generally vaccinated, such as AstraZeneca.
Let's be clear: Neither my plea in the spring of last year to give special protection to those most at risk in order to prevent the pandemic from spreading to old people's and nursing homes, nor the risk-ethical insight that the very old have priority Discrimination, in the sense of an ethically inadmissible disadvantage. Neither were the elderly discriminated against with the demand to protect vulnerable persons in particular, nor were young people disadvantaged by the demand to prioritize the elderly in the vaccination. If, on the other hand, the risk were equally or almost equally distributed across the different age groups, then the criticism would be justified. In any case, the prioritization of the most vulnerable does not arise from a widespread hatred of children in Germany, as is supposed to be typical for patriarchal societies. On the edge:Wasn't Italy of the 1950s and 1960s famous for having a lot of children and having a lot of children not a patriarchal country?
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Julian Nida-Rümelin, Nathalie Weidenfeld
The Reality of Risk: About Sensible Dangerous Handling
Publisher: Piper
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Piper
Number of pages: 224
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It is correct that we should end the burden of pandemic measures, which are particularly serious for children and adolescents, as soon as possible. But what is "as soon as possible"? Opinions differ here. My view is that we must not use the sometimes high, sometimes even rising incidences in children and adolescents as an opportunity to maintain the restrictions on them. The health risks of children and adolescents are so minimal compared to the health risks of older age groups that they do not justify continuing to limit them with the same measures, although the reasons for the demanded "solidarity with their grandparents" are increasingly no longer due to the progress of the vaccination campaign . When the grandparents are protectedif solidarity in the pandemic no longer has to be demanded from their grandchildren, then children and adolescents do not have to limit themselves to protect their grandparents from Covid-19 infections.
By May 11, a total of 40,588 women and 44,300 men had died in Germany. Of these 85,000 people who died, 19 were under the age of 20, which means that less than a four-thousandth of all deaths were from children and adolescents. However, every single death is one too many. And in the case of children and adolescents, deaths are particularly tragic. It is to be hoped that the evaluation of these few serious cases will allow us to determine particular risk factors and then protect the children and adolescents affected by vaccination. A continuation of the general restrictive measures against the youngest in this society, who have suffered particularly for months, should, however, be avoided.We can and should release the children and adolescents into full freedom as soon as possible as the vaccination campaign progresses.