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...