No it's not. There's still no evidence that there is any real risk to children. Please prove otherwise. Anecdotes and one in a million cases don't count.
Even seemingly innocuous viruses like Epstein-Barr are tied to various health problems later in life. Why should we knowingly expose an entire generation to a little understood virus?
So less than one in a million children hospitalized per day. And 500 dead after almost two years is nothing, sorry to be so blunt.
You can say epstein-barr, I can say other corona viruses like the cold virus. You can't just choose an arbitrary virus to compare to. We need strong evidence of serious risk to impose such restrictions, and not ungrounded fear which is not backed by data.
Fear mongers run out of ammunition for forever lockdowns. Low quality of arguments will be compensated by hysteria and insults. For instance that you don't care about children (while in their age group it's less harmful than a flu).
> Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year:
No, not only does this exaggerate the normal annual impact, but it has killed far fewer (about half) in that age group than COVID has during the COVID crisis. Most of the COVID countermeasures (everything other than the vaccine itself) are effective against the flu, too, and COVID is much more dangerous (considering both deadliness and infectiousness) than the flu even to kids.
With apologies, I'll correct myself: flu kills hundreds, sometimes thousands of children per year. My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid. It's important to keep that in perspective, is all I'm saying.
> My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid.
This is false if you include the period during which COVID-19 has been around in “every year”, because COVID countermeasures also suppress the flu. Without COVID countermeasures, and without vaccination for most kids, COVID would kill far more than the flu normally does. Now, the COVID vaccine right now is more effective than the flu vaccine usually is (but that may be temporary if COVID is endemic and different variants proliferate), so with vaccines available to younger kids than now that might get evened out or reverse, but right now COVID is clearly far more deadly to kids.
You can't make a direct comparison between a global pandemic and a normal year for influenza. In future years there won't be as many opportunities for people to be infected with Covid, further reducing the risk.
I'm already bored to tears talking about this, though. The only point that I'm trying to make is that we have always accepted a certain level of mortal risk to people, including children. At some point, we are going to have to do that with Covid as well.
So looks like more kids were hospitalized and more died from the flu? What bull are you referring to? Were you outraged about them in any of the last 20 years?
It's not about children getting it and being ill, it's about children getting it and spreading it. This is the concept behind 'herd immunity'. If we can cut the chain, we mitigate older and people with weakened immune systems from getting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
Yes, but parent poster wrote: "Any talk of lifting restrictions before march is basically a re-formulated "fuck the kids"."
which is not honest in my opinion. The kids so far have suffered the most from corona - no school, no friends - no activities - yet had the least, to fear from it.
So vaccinating the kids is not really about saving the kids - it is about the older population.
But if vaccinated people are also spreading it, I don't get the point of waiting for kids to be vaccinated.
The population at risk being vaccinated was the big deal, but that's done now (apart from those who refuse to be vaccinated, but then it is their problem).
The Delta variant is contagious enough that we'll never achieve a level of herd immunity sufficient to protect unvaccinated people. All of us will be infected eventually, it's basically inevitable. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing deaths.
It is not a binary 0 or 1 as far as if vaccinated people will spread the infection if they are infected. The vaccine lowers the chances, so the more people we can get vaccinated, the lower the chances can get.
> It's not about children getting it and being ill, it's about children getting it and spreading it.
Vaccinated people can still get ill and spread it so why do you keep pushing vaccines to children who have no risk whatsoever if the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated and are safe??
Early this year it looked as if the virus was on the way out in Israel until they started opening up schools again. The risk to children is small, but it's a communicable disease - school is how it spreads between households.
When doing risk assessments I wish people started looking beyond their own immediate circle. Then again, Pharao let the Children of Israel go only after his own firstborn son died.
Asymptomatic spread of the virus is negligible from everything I've read. Children that don't show symptoms aren't a threat. Additionally, there's really no evidence that schools are spreading the virus more.
I suspect the reason children are the hold up here is less around current data than around where we are in this pandemic and patterns of thought/risk assessment. Here's an analogy that maybe will work with the HN crowd. Say we've got a service that, for 75% of the API endpoints, often gets a severe error. 25% of the endpoints only very rarely get the same error. My team discovers that by applying one simple change to the 75% of the affected endpoints, their error rate drops dramatically. We can't, for whatever reason, apply the same fix to those 25% yet, but we're confident that within a relatively short amount of time we'll be able to.
Do we declare that the service is now working well and move on to other items? Maybe -- in a real setting it'll of course depend on what other priorities the team's juggling at the moment. Maybe this is "good enough" to move on. Still, I think we can all relate to the emotional pull to say "hold on, we still don't actually know why those 25% of our endpoints weren't affected as often. Something could easily change there so that we start seeing similar error rates. We have a fix on the way for this -- can we wait just a bit longer so we can roll this out?"
I think that's where a lot of people are. Again, one could certainly argue that we're close enough, but OTOH I think the reluctance to declare this "over" yet makes a lot of sense too.
Almost 4000 children die each year from drowning in the USA, with double that having a non-fatal drowning [0]. Note that non-fatal drownings can cause long-term health problems. They haven't banned pools yet, so it follows that, as a country, the USA considers 4000 dead children an acceptable risk of having open water, such as rivers, ponds, and pools. And bath tubs, I suppose.
Now with that number in mind, how many children are expected to die if all of them were to be infected with covid-19? I found it hard to find some numbers about this, in my country all corona-deaths of people aged 49 or less are grouped together these days because there are so few that they could be traced to individuals otherwise.
The information on that CDC page is misleading. While the page is about children, the text that mentions the 3960 annual drowning deaths does not specify "children," and the number seems to be across all age groups.
This source states ~800 children deaths/year to be children (in 2014). [0]
(I am not commenting on your overall point, just that statistic.)
For reference, the CDC notes annual total US children deaths (if defining "children" as <= 14) as a little over 9000 (in 2019, I think). [1]
Thanks for the correction! I guess I sound a bit callous in my previous post, but I'm quite happy to learn that 3000 fewer children drown each year than I anticipated (it did feel like a high number). The 800 deaths per year figure can still function as a comparison for the expected child deaths from covid-19.
> Younger people, under 30, and children are getting it and ending up in hospital.
To emphasise this point, in Victoria, Australia, most of the cases are in the 20-29 age group. Most of the active cases are in the 0-9 age group.[0] NSW data doesn't have the pretty graphs, but the raw data [1] bears out similar groupings.
Your first link reports that out of the thousands of total cases, only 20 are in the hospital, 9 of which are in the ICU. This does not support the claim that young people are "widely" ending up in the hospital from COVID.
A COVID case != serious illness, especially in vaccinated individuals. We need to stop pretending that they are equivalent.
> Your first link reports that out of the thousands of total cases, only 20 are in the hospital, 9 of which are in the ICU.
My first link reports 492 total active cases, not thousands.
If you want to use the total cases, then you should be noting that 820 people have died, and 20,212 have recovered. The mortality calculated from that is a simple 3.8%.
20 hospitalised cases out of 492 total active cases, is about 4%, and the 9 in ICU are about 2% of total active cases.
>My first link reports 492 total active cases, not thousands.
You are correct, I was looking at total cases, not active cases. My apologies!
However, this still does not support the claim that young people are "widely" going to the hospital. Even assuming that age ranges are going to the hospital at equal rates (which is a preposterous assumption), given 20 total hospitalizations spread across 492 active cases (of which 290 are ages 0-29), we would only expect ~11/290 active COVID cases under 30 to be hospitalized. But again, this an extremely unrealistic upper bound, based on the ludicrous assumption that all ages get hospitalized at equal rates.
On top of that, these data are from Australia, where the population is still not widely vaccinated. I assume the vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients in Victoria are not fully vaccinated.
>The mortality calculated from that is a simple 3.8%.
This (and all previous calculations) depend on accurately estimating the denominator, i.e. the total number of cases. Given the amount of asymptomatic/low symptomatic cases, how is this accurately done? Has the composition of who gets tested shifted over the course of the pandemic? Has it ever actually accurately sampled the true number of cases?
The vast majority [0] of cases in Victoria are for the 20-29 age group. There are as many cases for the 10-19 age group as the 40-49 age group.
The vast majority of currently active cases right now are for the 0-9 age group.
Whilst there isn't a current breakdown of mortality by age rate, the overall mortality rate for Victoria is 4%, meaning that there is a high risk to children.
A mortality rate of 4% in Victoria is obviously wrong. The only way to get a number that high is to ignore all the asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic cases. US CDC data shows a mortality rate of only 0.6%, and that's mostly from earlier in the pandemic before vaccines were available.
The Victorian government data you linked is very unclear.
It treats cases in aged care vs. not in aged care as separate sets, but is not clear on whether or not hospitalisation cases come from both sets.
At the top of the page it says "cases in hospital by age" but I can't seem to find any reference to the age of those people in hospital.
What's clear to me, though, is in the age group of 0-29 there's been a total of 1 death in Victoria. It's not a whole lot to go on, but it seems unlikely to me that many in the 0-29 group require hospital treatment.
> The vast majority of currently active cases right now are for the 0-9 age group.
And then you shared data that shows 0-9 age group with less than 30%. Since we apparently agree on how to read the chart, I can only assume the words “vast majority” were not what you meant.
Only 73 Pediatric ICU Beds in North Texas (from the Yahoo! Article)? This article puts a little different perspective on that reality - ‘No Staffed Pediatric ICU Beds Available’ In North Texas Area, DFW Hospital Council Says https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2021/08/12/no-staffed-pediatric-icu...
There are risks to all of us when we let millions of children act as a breeding and mutation substrate for the virus. I would think that would be blinding obvious to anyone with even a basic grasp of biology.
It’s also completely unknown what the long term effects of the virus are.
Edit: Disappointed but not surprised by the amount of anti-science on this site. I feel like a lot of people have let politics destroy their ability to think critically to the point of near suicidal ignorance. Sad.
The other user was suggesting lifting restrictions would be equal to "fuck the kids". Clearly that is not the case.
As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?
> As for the risk of new mutations: if we were truly worried about that then perhaps the priority should be vaccinating the populations of poorer countries instead?
Vaccinate everyone, there’s no shortage of vaccine. Remember when Bill Gates fought to stop the manufacture of vaccine in other countries? People like him are the enemy to a fully vaccinated population.
Given global vaccination rates, it will have abundant and plentiful opportunities for breeding and mutation forever. There is no vaccinating the entire globe for coronavirus. Certainly not in our lifetimes. And not given the declining effectiveness of the vaccines.
I agree that the whole globe will not be vaccinated and that will continue to be a problem. That doesn’t negate what I said though, unvaccinated children are a huge part of that problem.
> And not given the low effectiveness of the vaccines.
I have no idea what this means. It sounds like you’re under false impressions. The vaccines are quite effective.
I meant “declining.” Revised simultaneous with your comment. If the vaccine immunity does not persist and requires boosters, we will never reach global here immunity. The parent article is on point.
