Medical research director sees light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel | Hacker News Reader

Medical research director sees light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel

nautil.us

61 pointsdnetesn32 comments

"Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital."

Is this a typo? Possibly he meant 0.2%?

The data from my county (Alameda) has 1,450 cases <18 and 0 deaths: https://covid-19.acgov.org/data.page

Similarly, data from South Korea, Spain, and Italy, and China is <= 0.2%: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatalit...

Sadly the typo will never be corrected.

That stood out to me as well. I think it meant to say: 2% of children who were diagnosed with the multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) died from it.

> 80% of the children who developed the condition required intensive care, 20% required mechanical ventilation, and four children, or 2%, died. [https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/29/nejm-inflammation-childr...]

And this interpretation is consistent with the following statistic:

As of August 6, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has received reports of 570 confirmed cases of MIS-C and 10 deaths.

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/13/we-asked-scientists-about-t....

According to BUsiness insider, Flu is more dangerous for children than COVID: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-seasona...

COVID is about 5 times more dangerous for 20 - mid forty year olds, but still quite low, in terms of mortality.

Honestly, I'd bet flu would be more dangerous among the older were it not for vaccines.

According to BUsiness insider

That well known medical journal.

You shouldn't be downvoted. CDC data also shows that influenza is more dangerous than COVID-19 for children.

https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/pedfludeath.html

Definitely. In Allegheny county (Pittsburgh), out of the 214 diagnosed cases in the 0-9 age group, there were a total of 4 hospitalizations (1.87%), 0 ICU (0%) and 0 deaths (0%).

https://www.alleghenycounty.us/Health-Department/Resources/C...

Here's the full quote: "We now see this multi-system, inflammatory condition can be fatal for kids, who average 8 years old. Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital. We see it in some adults. It’s debilitating, not requiring hospitalization, but they have difficulty breathing and joint aches—which are really telling—chest pain, and other symptoms that affect brain function."

It looks like a typo. It should say "Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with MIS-C in the United States have died from it"

Edit: I just realized the first comment in the article has exactly the same suggestion

Good catch. The next question is what percentage of kids contract MIS-C as a result of COVID? Based on the <18 death toll reported so far, it seems like it must be a small percentage.

Edit: Answering my own question with a quick reading of [1]. 186 patients identified total, if I'm reading correctly. This is a tiny number. 2% of that would be 4 kids.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021680

"As of 8/6/2020, CDC has received reports of 570 confirmed cases of MIS-C and 10 deaths in 40 states and Washington, DC."

"99% of cases (565) tested positive for SARS CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The remaining 1% were around someone with COVID-19."

https://www.cdc.gov/mis-c/cases/index.html

Thanks, the first study I linked had only looked at 26 states. This is still a very small number considering the total number of likely cases of COVID in the <18 demographic.

Thanks, so the chance is roughly 500/5,000,000 among individuals with a positive covid test.

MIS-C only affects children so the denominator is less than 5,000,000. But your point still stands, it seems to be relatively rare.

It’s been corrected... “Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, who have developed multi-system, inflammatory condition, have died from it...”

Gotta keep the population scared. Same thing happened during AIDS epidemic.

Pandemics end when people end them, not when the disease ends.

Do you mean that pandemics don’t really end, but only get reclassified?

Or do you mean they end when we cure ourselves through vaccines, herd immunity etc.?

These kind of highly communicable respiratory pandemics only get reclassified. What we call "flu season", for example, is just the continuing spread of past flu pandemics. Most health officials expect that this will be the long term trajectory for the coronavirus, even with vaccines and herd immunity.

Some years we still have flu pandemics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957–1958_influenza_pandemic

That’s 1+ million deaths when world population was less than 1/2 what it is today.

And the 1968 Hong Kong flu, which killed 1-4 million people, world population half of what it is today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_flu_pandemic

Or we can just wear masks in public forever. Wouldn’t that squash it? Every flu?

Let's all concentrate and make it end today, then!! I'm relieved the solution is so simple. </sarcasm>

Why the hell does the URL have "love--sex" in it?

From a little link in the right sidebar, it appears this article is part of Nautilus issue #88, titled "Love & Sex": http://nautil.us/issue/88/love--sex

"Love & Sex" is the title of issue 88, the current issue of the print/online magazine in which this article appears.

I was surprised to notice that Nautilus does not use HTTPS. I wonder what the thinking (or lack of) behind that is?

The other thing that stood out to me is this "The incidence of it is anywhere from 10 to 80 percent, even in young people who recover from a mild attack of COVID-19" about "Long COVID".

That seems very high.

In the medium-term the most promising thing out there is better, faster, easier testing. There are a number of organisations developing saliva-based tests that can return results in around an hour for a few dollars a test. Being able to test everyone on a regular basis may well be enough to keep the disease under control without major impact on our lives.

There are significant resources going into scaling up new testing technologies, but it's definitely not getting the support that vaccine development is, and maybe it should.

>We now see this multi-system, inflammatory condition can be fatal for kids, who average 8 years old. Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital.

Schools are open in much of this country.

It’s a typo or plain old lie. Here’s some data:

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-death...

I would question this statistic, could even be a typo?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com