New York City police are pulling their hair out dealing with the recidivism of all the dangerous criminals Mayor Bill de Blasio has released onto the streets. But de Blasio has suddenly discovered his concern for community danger. No – not the man he released who allegedly just robbed a victim at knifepoint, but a local Jewish day school that reopened its doors for classes.

Actually, the mayor is correct in asserting that he “can’t stress how dangerous this is for our young people.” COVID-19 is not dangerous at all for school-age children, at least not any more than the typical risk associated with driving to school or getting harmed by one of the sex offenders or robbers de Blasio released from Rikers Island.

Just how low is the risk to children? Yesterday, Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, posted an age-stratified risk chart comparing the risk of dying of the flu to the risk of dying of COVID-19. Here is the data, based on information from the CDC:

I would argue that the risk of healthy people dying of COVID-19, as compared to the flu, is even more favorable than this data suggests, because nearly all of the deaths from COVID-19 are among those with several known conditions, whereas flu-related ICU admissions, with children placed on life support, as reported by doctors in New York City just this year, were observed among children who were not immunocompromised.

Nevertheless, if we use this data, it means children are nearly seven times more likely to die of the flu than of the coronavirus, yet de Blasio never thought of shutting the schools for the flu. In fact, in March, before this issue became political and common sense was still in order, de Blasio himself thought shutting the schools was a dumb idea. "What are these kids going to do?" de Blasio asked. "Do we really believe these kids will hole up in their rooms for a month?" Well, now he wants them to be holed up indefinitely for months.

What does he think will happen to the immune systems of healthy school-age children who are treated like bubble boys for months on end? Imagine what next year’s flu and cold season will bring.

Just how much more of a risk is the flu to children than COVID-19? A group of British pediatric doctors posted a chart online comparing COVID-19 deaths among children to flu deaths over the same period of time beginning in February. This is not even a comparison to flu deaths over a typical flu season (which would include December and January), but rather a comparison over the course of the epidemic, which includes April and May, which typically have few deaths from the flu. But still, at least in the United States, flu deaths have been much higher.

And guess which European country seems to have the lowest infection rate among kids? Sweden! Yes, the country that didn’t shut down schools for young children.

As for children transmitting the disease to adults, data from Iceland, the U.K., Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, France, and Taiwan already show that children have little or no role in transmitting the virus to adults. They can get the virus from adults, but it is not a danger to them in any statistically meaningful numbers. Nonetheless, to play it safe, we can continue keeping children away from vulnerable adults. Doing so doesn’t require shutting down schools.

Now, nearly all the European countries have opened or plan to open schools. America is now dead last in terms of liberty and science. Think about that for a moment. Democrats in this country, such as New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, have become such flat-earthers that they are promoting policies of lingering lockdowns until there is a “widely available” vaccine. This has never been done in human history and is being rejected by nearly every other country.

Where are Republicans? Where is the veto threat of the president to deny bailout funding to states unless they end this nonsense? Instead, several Republicans in the Senate — Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La.; Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss.; and Susan Collins, R-Maine — are pushing for an additional $500 billion rewarding the bad behavior of these states – to cover and incentivize the very carnage they created.

What has become clear is that the schools are the lynchpin to this entire charade. It is not science that is driving the shutdown of schools, but politics. Yet this political decision helps drive a self-fulfilling circuitous cycle of fear and panic – as if there is a threat to children. The minute schools open up, which will be the single most decisive factor in returning families to their daily lives, the lockdowns will fall by the wayside. Unfortunately for us, people like de Blasio have worked too hard and accumulated too much power through the lockdowns to let this go. Science be damned.

Imagine taking a non-hot spot for coronavirus, locking down the people, achieving a worse outcome than surrounding states that didn’t lock down, and then suffering worse unemployment from the lockdown than New York. Welcome to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s lockdown magic.

Minnesota is surrounded on three sides by some of the few states in the country that did not formally issue a shelter-in-place order at any time during this crisis. According to the dictates of the lockdown crowd, these states should have been smoldering ash, given their reluctance to do what the “experts” tell us is the best and only way to prevent mass deaths from the virus. Well, it turns out the states that didn’t lock down had low fatality rates, some of them especially low.

Here are the deaths per million people as of yesterday, according to Worldometer:

Wyoming: 12

Utah: 13

South Dakota: 13

Arkansas: 17

North Dakota: 25

Nebraska: 29

Iowa: 43

Most of these seven states are at or near the bottom in terms of death rates per million people.

Minnesota is surrounded by Iowa to its south and the Dakotas to the west. Unlike Iowa and the Dakotas, Minnesota went full lockdown, ordered by Tim Walz. In the end, the fatality rate per million people of 54 was still relatively low compared to most states in the northeast, but higher than the surrounding states that did not issue lockdown orders. This demonstrates that given the demographics and geography of the upper Midwest states, there was no reason whatsoever for Walz not to follow in the footsteps of his neighbors.

In fact, Walz joined the media’s pile-on against the other governors in the region.

“I do worry about that,” Walz said on April 8, according to Twincities.com, adding that he had communicated with officials in Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota. “It’s probably only a matter of time before they issue those, too.”

Well, look who has egg on his face now.

Walz is a big proponent of lockdown. “I think most of these retailers and businesses understand they’re going to have to change the way business is being done for about the next 18 months,” said Walz last week.

Despite just 300 statewide deaths, Minneapolis is actually tightening, not loosening restrictions. According to the Star-Tribune, the state is now "removing or blocking basketball rims, removing tennis and volleyball nets, and posting signs notifying park visitors that soccer fields, playgrounds and skate parks are closed."

Sure, shutting down outdoor activities for predominantly young people makes a lot of sense when studies show nearly no transmissions outdoors and when not a single person under 40 years of age and very few under 65 died in Minnesota.

In general, researchers have found absolutely no correlation between early and severe lockdown states and low COVID-19 death numbers. Florida has achieved one of the best results of any large state despite its elderly population. Governor Ron DeSantis was raked over the coals for being late to implement a very weak shelter-in-place order under pressure. Yesterday, he struck back at his opponents:

Minnesota’s governor should listen and learn.

If Minnesota didn’t accomplish anything in terms of saving more lives, what did it accomplish? A worse unemployment rate than even New York. In recent weeks, 16 percent of Minnesota’s workforce filed unemployment claims, placing the state squarely in the top half of state workforces hit by the shutdown. That is just ahead of New York’s 14.6 percent. Remember that Minnesota had just over 300 deaths. Such disruption is much less justifiable than New York’s shutdown.

South Dakota, on the other hand, saw just 6 percent of its workforce file for unemployment, the lowest in the nation. Governor Kristi Noem came under tremendous pressure to issue a shelter-in-place order. Now she has been proven right and Governor Walz proven wrong.

Not only will more people die from the lockdown and unemployment, but thanks to the severe lockdown and the ensuing panic that it has driven, the Mayo Clinic, one of the most important employers in the state, was forced to furlough 40 percent of its workforce. Aside from the state and federal government, hospital systems are the top employers in the state. The fact that they have taken a greater hit than anyone else demonstrates the perfidious circular logic of shutting down elective procedures in order to stop a supposed overrun of hospitals in a state with 300 COVID-19 deaths.

What is particularly jarring about Minnesota is that three-quarters of the fatalities were in long-term care homes. That is 77 percent of 300 deaths. Thus, rather than focusing 100 percent of his resources on securing nursing homes, he cast a wide net on constitutional rights and accomplished nothing other than destroying his state’s economy.

Good job, Gov. Walz. You and your advisers will still collect your paychecks for creating a “cure” worse than the illness.