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.
Unknown how many will long-term health effects.
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?
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.
And We're about 5-6 weeks away from vaccines to be approved for children 5-11 years old.
With that the hammers going to come down on people whose argument for prolonging this is 'I don't wanna'
We are actually _incredibly_ fortunate that Covid spares children to the degree that it does.
No, it does not. You didn't actually look at the numbers. One of the worst years overall shows 115 for 0-4 and 528 for 5-17:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
There are some years where the total is a little over a thousand, but most are well below.
Don't spread this bull.
The bull that was clearly quoted? "Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year". The linked data does not say that at all.
You're being difficult just to be difficult here.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
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).
They are less likely to be infected, and it looks like they have a shorter infectious period.
Herd immunity may be achievable with this in mind, but no one really knows right now. New variants may change the calculus too.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
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.
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.
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??
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.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/21/925794511/were-the-risks-of-r...
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.
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.
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]
[0] https://www.safekids.org/press-release/almost-800-kids-drown...
Younger people, under 30, and children are getting it and ending up in hospital.
It’s widely reported here in Australia.
Children are at risk.
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.
The data does bear out the risk.
[0] https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/victorian-coronavirus-cov...
Either I can't read graphs, or you can't.
And you absolutely cannot take the overall mortality rate and apply it to the one age group we know practically none have died from in the past.
So, as I said, the data doesn't bear this out so far as I've seen.
That would be _you_. Here's the numbers from said active case graph.
+ 0-9 - 112
+ 10-19 - 100
+ 20-29 - 78
+ 30-39 - 105
+ 40-49 - 54
+ 50-59 - 25
+ 60-69 - 14
+ 70-79 - 3
+ 80-89 - 1
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
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.
[0] https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/victorian-coronavirus-cov...
[1] https://data.nsw.gov.au/data/dataset/nsw-covid-19-cases-by-a...
A COVID case != serious illness, especially in vaccinated individuals. We need to stop pretending that they are equivalent.
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.
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?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/child-covid-19-hospital...
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.
Long term beyond a year and a half? I think it's safe to assume there is very little.
> 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.
Times like these I wish HN had a downvote button, since that’s total misinformation.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0818-covid-19-boost...
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.