Lessons Ignored: Children and Pandemics

Abstract

Children became sick and died during pandemics roughly 100 years apart, but they are rarely the central focus of historical scholarship. Because children were not the largest group of victims in the 1918 pandemic or in the COVID-19 pandemic and because of their lack of political capital, their needs received little attention. Both pandemics exposed the many holes in the nation’s health and welfare infrastructure. We examine responses to children’s needs in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the peak pandemic year of 1918 and then show how this legacy of the lack of any child policy infrastructure left the city underresourced during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Am J Public Health. 2023;113(9):985–990. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307334 )