Editorial: What keeps kids safe from COVID-19? Vaccinated adults

You can choose to get the COVID-19 vaccine in exchange for free targets at a shooting range in downstate Sparta, free doughnuts at Krispy Kreme or free passes to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library in Springfield.

Outside Illinois, you can find places where you can get free beer, free cash, free savings bonds or free Nathan's Famous hot dogs in exchange for getting a vaccine.

Go ahead and collect the freebies if it gets the shot in your arm, but we think there's an even better incentive to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

The kids.

Children under 16 can't get vaccinated against the virus, although that threshold could drop to age 12 with Food and Drug Administration approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for that age group expected within days.

Those who are younger have limited forms of protection from the coronavirus. Masking and social distancing work, but are a tough proposition for young kids. Isolation from friends, classrooms and sports certainly works, but kids' and parents' collective exhaustion with home quarantine has hit its peak.

What keeps kids safe if they can't be vaccinated? Vaccinated adults.

An Israeli study confirmed that high rates of vaccinated adults in a community strongly correspond with fewer COVID-19 cases in unvaccinated children in that community.

In the suburbs, more outbreaks - though not necessarily more cases - are involving children. Outbreaks of five or more related cases in the month ending April 24 included a day care, a preschool and a sports team, as well as a medical or dental clinic, a behavioral or mental health facility and a group home, Daily Herald writer Marni Pyke reports. School outbreaks are tracked separately.

Children account for 22% of new cases, the American Academy of Pediatrics said Monday, up from 3% a year ago.

COVID-19 certainly causes fewer deaths and severe cases in children than it did in the ravaged over-65 group. But it's not benign. The AAP reports 3.8 million kids are known to have had COVID-19, about 15,500 have been hospitalized and 300 kids have died, enough to put COVID-19 in the top 10 causes of death for kids. And that's an undercount, since seven states including Texas and New York outside of New York City did not provide age data.

Stories of children lost to COVID-19, collected in The Washington Post and elsewhere, are wrenching. There's no acceptable threshold of child deaths from preventable causes. Consider that one child's death triggered a recall of Peloton treadmills worth hundreds of millions of dollars this week.

Vaccination is free. It's easy, now that the initial rush has passed. It prevents transmission to kids, even if you personally are not in direct contact with kids. It also protects other adults.

Children can have a normal school year in the fall and holidays surrounded by family, without the risk, however small, of getting sick with COVID-19.

You can make it happen.