So over 800k people over the age of 50 have died from covid in the US.

Are you saying that it's "dishonest" to estimate that at least 1% of them are grandparents involved in childcare? By napkin math this more than works out; I'll also hint that if you spend even a minute researching, the stats on how many of these people are likely to be grandparents, and how many grandparents are child carers, are readily findable. If you care to engage in an honest discussion.

Why?

I imagine their point is that, given the number of deaths, the number is probably considerably higher than one would expect from just "thousands".

The bigger point being that childcare expectations were thoroughly disrupted and folk were thrust into it, rather than planning. Coupled with the "will they won't they" come back to work dates, it's made it not super incentivizing for those of us who could afford to figure out better long term options chose not to. Ex. If you knew it was going to be two years before you were expected back in office, moving closer to family might have made sense. Or setting up a home office. Or any number of things to better our home productivity.

There's no evidence to show that families' childcare providers (aka grandparents) have died in the thousands, leaving people without childcare. The parent commenter is assuming because there was a disease that disproportionately affected elderly folks, that it must be correlated with that.

If there is a disease that has caused a large number of older people to die, and many of those older people are grandparents, and many grandparents help out with childcare, and having to work with less help than previously re childcare is likely to cause a problem for a lot of people, I'm not seeing the problem with assuming a correlation given that argument and its conclusion. Which premises are you disputing?

The weekly average just for the US last time I checked was over 1,000 deaths per day. I don’t even have to calculate age distribution to know that thousands of grandparents in a childcare role have been among those deaths.

We're at about 2k today.

Yeah the last time I checked happened to be today, mainly because I only look when I see obviously bad policy around it. I rounded way down because there’s no imaginable scenario where fewer than thousands of grandparents performing childcare have died, and it’s such an absurd challenge that giving it the most favorable interpretation of the facts still shows it’s absurd.