Washington (CNN)Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a significant false claim on Friday about Covid-19's impact on children.
Sotomayor made the remark during a Friday hearing about the legality of the Biden administration's attempt to require large employers to force workers to be vaccinated for the virus or undergo weekly testing.
Here is a fact check of Sotomayor's claim and claims made at the hearing by two other justices.
Sotomayor, a liberal, tried during the Friday hearing to emphasize the danger posed by the omicron variant of the virus. She said, "We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators."
Facts First: Sotomayor's claim about children wasn't even close to accurate. According to federal data at the time Sotomayor spoke, fewer than 5,000 people under the age of 18 were hospitalized in the US with confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19; the reported number of child hospitalizations was 4,464 on Thursday, the day before the hearing, and was still under 5,000 as of Monday afternoon. And though there is no official data on how many of these hospitalized children are in "serious condition" -- a term Sotomayor didn't define but is used by hospitals to refer to patients who are acutely ill, with vital signs that may be unstable -- it's overwhelmingly likely that not all of them are.
Sotomayor could have correctly said that the number of children...
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