Children's Risk of Serious Illness from Covid-19 Is as Low as It Is for the Flu | Hacker News Reader

Children's Risk of Serious Illness from Covid-19 Is as Low as It Is for the Flu

npr.org

105 pointsstakkur101 comments

But the risk for children getting sick at school and bringing it back to their parents very much does not play out like the flu.

I also think it is irresponsible for this article to not mention what ages they’re actually talking about. At some point there is a crossover of the risk and it may be in the younger to mid teens.

And the teachers. I know 2 teachers that are terrified that the kids will get them Covid-19, since they already get sick from the petri dishes that are children.

Are they not vaccinated? Do they not trust that the vaccine works, at least as far as preventing serious illness?

Here in Norway the vaccine rollout for non-critical people followed just age brackets. So I, a programmer with zero issues working from home, got the vaccine weeks before tons of younger teachers, who had to go to class each day and meet kids which could potentially infect them.

I guess it would be complicated if they had to start introducing multiple levels, or some sort of "you can have my seat" functionality, still...

In most US states teachers were prioritized along with firefighters, health workers, etc.

At least my state had a variety of non-age-related (self-reported) criteria for phases of eligibility including occupational and various health conditions.

Yes they are. At least one of them has their health compromised and breakthrough cases have been a thing since day 1. Also, they work with a LOT of kids, so that alot more chances for exposure.

They are not dumb.

If the teachers are vaxxed and boosted, COVID is less threatening than the flu.

And if they aren’t, it seems like they don’t have grounds to complain.

The only way this worry makes sense is if the teachers live with somebody who is highly immunocompromised. Which would indeed suck, but it’s crazy to design societal policy around those dangers.

Is less threatening for the single short outlook of being hospitalized. We still do not know the long term effects of Covid across a large population and it seems our governments have given up in favor of continued service in the economy.

Yep this is important; Polio presented a lot like the flu, it wasn't until years or decades later that symptoms showed up. They didn't call it "long polio" though, they called it "post-polio syndrome". Famous author of 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke ended up in a wheelchair decades due to post-polio syndrome after he contracted polio

What are you proposing otherwise? This: https://news.yahoo.com/remote-learning-led-to-catastrophic-l... Catastrophic learning loss. Any parents who can't afford nannies and won't die without working have had one leave the workforce. The ones who would die have just abandoned their kids.

What I would propose is movement away from nuclear family to more communal living and extended family, but I just see oblivious people push remote learning like it actually solves the problem for most.

It seems the the conclusion that remote learning causes learning loss is very premature and not differentable from a lot of other factors that occurred simultaneously. Massive job losses, or incredible stresses on parents and family units, learning curve on remot resources, not a full year with massive educational environment changes, alternate standard testing regeimes, etc.

That conclusion does however support a push for a return to work economic policy.

Less threatening than the flu if you're vaccinated against flu or just against the flu without vaccination? Influenza is not a harmless disease either, people at risk are advised to get a yearly shot.

>"But the risk for children getting sick at school and bringing it back to their parents very much not does not play out like the flu."

I don't think this is true, and I'd be interested to see data that backs up that claim. On that topic, here's a thoughtful article that dives into claims like that:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-kids-were-safe-f...

My wife has been a public school teacher for 21 years, and has the same concerns and fears as anyone. Teachers, like other humans, have a spectrum of beliefs, concerns, and experiences.

There have been studies that confirmed it with the older Covid strains which were less transferable than even delta, let alone Omicron. With increased transfer rates it becomes an even more viable vector.

The article you quote says this “ Once you get to a certain point of community infection rates, it does look like being in-person … is associated with COVID spread in the community,” said Katharine Strunk, an author of the study and professor at Michigan State University.”

We are back to high community infection rates with omicron.

The new variants are more contagious but less deadly, so the situation is probably better now.

> There have been studies that confirmed it with the older Covid strains which were less transferable than even delta, let alone Omicron. With increased transfer rates it becomes an even more viable vector

Please cite some. No offense but after nearly 2 years of constant rumor about this virus, the treatments, the vaccines, etc… when I see: “there are studies that show (fill in the blank)” with no studies cited—-I assume hearsay.

The risk of anyone un-vaxxed going to the hospital after catching covid is 0.89% (source: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...) and it is even lower than that if you are vaxxed.

It is incredibly unnecessary and risky to vax children, and probably most adults. The only people that this vax should be recommended to are people in high-risk categorizes.

0,89% is a lot. That's why you vaccinate.

There is an uncharacterized unknown risk in the long term post-sickness effects of Covid. Many may survive the immediate sickness but virus remains in the most for at least months, and there could be long term tissue damage or other changes.

Also I’m not sure why you say the vaccine is such a risk for children. It’s currently undergoing study and an even younger age range is close to being approved. In general we are talking about a vaccine with some minuscule portion of the dna pattern of the virus vs getting exposed to the virus itself which includes the same pattern, and will get multiplied to millions of times higher exposure - along with many many other sequences of the full virus - all with unknown long term effects.

To be clear the 0.89% figure was obtained by dividing hospitalizations by population, so it includes many unvaccinated people who have not caught COVID (yet).

The chance that an unvaccinated person who is COVID-positive will require hospitalization is around 3%.

Are these numbers for the US?

Yes. You can do a quick and dirty estimate working backwards from the article's own figure of 2.6 million COVID hospitalizations in the US. If you very generously assume 1/3 of Americans have been infected, you get a hospitalization rate of 2.3%. If you assume the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, then the risk to the unvaccinated must be higher.

I wouldn't call 1/3 "generous". https://covidestim.org/ has some estimates of the fraction of people ever infected by US state. I can't seem to find an US aggregate figure, but by clicking on a few random states they all seem to be at least 50%. California (the most populous state) is around 60% even before omicron.

Your estimate is likely off by a factor of two.

What’s the risk for non-obese people? Not that obese people should be considered less healthy, just curious because much of America, outside of San Francisco, is obese.

But they are obviously less healthy?

Obese people are less healthy, that's a fact.

Others have called out various bits of misinformation/lies in your post but I'll call out another.

We vaccinate children against a wide variety of things on a routine basis and a pre-requisite for attending school, and the covid vaccine is literally no more risky than those, and they aren't risky. It honestly feels straight anti-vax to make up lies calling it unnecessary and risky, especially with our health care systems once again succumbing to mainly unvaccinated covid idiots.

> It honestly feels straight anti-vax to make up lies calling it unnecessary and risky ...

I suggest that we charitably assume that everyone here is discussing in good faith. Otherwise it's hard to have productive arguments on contentious topics.

At what point do you stop assuming people are arguing in good faith? Because it seems unbelievable that everyone is.

I don't have a great answer. But I'm guessing that typically we'll have better discussions if we set a high bar for assuming bad intent.

While I agree it's a good default to assume good faith, there has to be a point where we assume a specific person is arguing in bad faith. I'm not advocating assuming everyone who disagrees with me is disingenuous, but merely that it seems some people are.

How many other medications do you take, or more specifically _require your children to take_ that:

1. were invented 18 months ago, have been available for only a year, and were hurried through the FDA's processes

2. underwent limited clinical trials

3. the manufacturers and providers are immune from lawsuits

4. the effectiveness was cited as 95% 8 months ago, but has proven to be much less.

...

I'm betting that the number is 0.

One has to admit, these vaccines and their rollout is all very unusual and against normal order. People having hesitation and skepticism is actually very healthy.

There's good reason to be skeptical. Here's a video on pfizer's own clinical study, that raises many questions on the rate of side effects, all cause mortality.

https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/media-resources/th...

This is literally anti-vax propaganda, and a shameful one at that. The Pfizer vaccine has saved millions of lives. This community has gone downhill. Ironic that I am called out for calling someone "anti-vax", too.

Well, "anti-vax" is a sweeping generalization, and usually meant as an insult. The comment speaks of skepticism, not denial or opposition; and, skepticism is very healthy. Critical thinking is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Oh come on now, we all know the Covid vaccines pushed in the west are nothing like what came before.

It's a completely new approach, which is why we know very little about long term consequences yet.

I'd say it feels straight insane to run this experiment on children when there's little to no risk of them getting sick from the actual virus.

Oh come on now, the MRNA vaccines (which are not the only ones in the west, as the west also uses more traditional vaccines like the J&J) are not that new and have been in production for decades.

And yes it's a completely new approach -- that is out of your body in weeks and sparks the same immune response that other approaches do.

The idea that there is long term consequences to this is a claim that needs evidence to back it. There's no reason to suggest there would be any new long term effects.

I'd say it feels straight insane to doom teachers, parents and grandparents to infection by school age children, while our hospitals are at capacity and rationing care, and I would call such a policy an intentional murder by policymakers. We know children bring covid-19 home, we know it tears through older populations, we know teachers are at risk, we know our hospitals are triaging care and declining patients, and you'd let that vector go unvaccinated.

All because you're afraid of long term consequences of a 2 decade old technology that causes the same physiological effects as the older technology.

BS.

Yes, we vaccinate children with established vaccines with well known risks that have been understood across decades. We simply do not have that knowledge with these vaccines. I believe saying it’s “no more risky” is relying on an assumption that simply is not based on any factual data, since the factual data to make that statement definitive will not exist for years.

Consider the following with these (mRNA) vaccines (speaking from a U.S. perspective): 1. This is a new type of vaccine that was developed extremely rapidly and the companies behind the vaccines have lawsuit protection against damage the vaccines may cause (now and in the future). 2. An accelerated testing protocol was used. 3. There are political drivers behind these mandates. 4. It is unknown if there are long term effects across the population at all ages and there some known specific risks for boys at a certain age group that has caused some countries to pause using these vaccines at certain age groups. 5. They don’t prevent infection in the same way that we understand other vaccines to work. 6. We have not yet established that the vaccine provides a greater severe disease protection rate in children beyond their already existing rate against severe disease Covid (there are just not enough kids experiencing severe disease to make a statistically significant prediction of vaccine protection).

I’m a thrice vaccinated individual, and I believe the risk/reward ratio for the vaccine for folks above 50 is frankly a no brainer decision. However, if I had young children…I’d be hesitant about vaccinating them with an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine and I think it’s simply much better to vaccinate the at risk population around the kids at this time where the severe Covid disease risk ratios are higher.

How much is 0.89% of 7.7 billion?

No, not "anyone", just average healthy people.

3-5% of the adult population have serious immune deficiency and are at very high risk (the vaccine has limited to zero impact on them). Everyone else (including children) getting vaccinated protects them.

This is hardly ever mentioned. The fact that children easily spread it back to parents, etc. was (and still is) conveniently left out of the discussion - even prior to access to vaccinations it was simply ignored. It’s one of the reasons we kept our children home from school, the first year of the pandemic. There were even “experts” arguing that children just didn’t spread the virus at all - which turned out to be ludicrous.

> This is hardly ever mentioned. The fact that children easily spread it back to parents, etc…

In no way was this ever left out of the discussion. This is a major part of the reason for all the virtual schooling that happened last year.

There were some early reports that children weren’t spreading COVID, and to my knowledge that data was correct. Delta changed that due to the ease with which it spread. But even in the context of early COVID variants, transmission from students to at risk adults was a common topic.

> The fact that children easily spread it back to parents, etc. was (and still is) conveniently left out of the discussion

Left out of the discussion? This is basically the entire discussion when vaccinating school children is ever brought up. It's the only defensible position to take.

Why is it a defensible position when vaccinated youth spread COVID at significantly the same rate as unvaccinated youth?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant it is the only defensible position to take if you are trying to instate vaccine mandate for school children. Considering children's risk for covid, having the primary worry be their own health is pretty hard to defend.

The vaccine does not prevent anyone from getting or spreading covid. In Ontario same case rate of covid per 100k residents, in unxxed as vaxxed and heading higher. 3rd graph.

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=IwAR2pRUq9GN9EEoDTm0...

Indeed, children are more vulnerable indirectly because of risk to their carers than the direct risk of the child’s own health.

The parents should be vaccinated, unless they have medical reason for not being able to.

I'm vaccinated and I'm not particularly concerned about my kids bringing the virus home now. I'm more worried for them.

Since children can't provide their own informed consent, its very morally dubious to give them medical treatments for something that is unlikely to make them sick, and seems on balance for the benefit of the parents. This is quite different from the other vaccines they currently take.

In the event that the covid vaccine turn out to have long term health effects, a child has a long life to live with those side effects, unlike a 70 year old. So their risk is greater, and their potential suffering much longer lasting.

Societies have generally made sacrifices for their children, and not sacrificed their children for the benefit of the elderly. The courts have also generally held the interests of the child supersedes the interests of the parents.

There's a significant precedent in this area: Rubella. Vaccinations are typically provided at 3-4 months of age (e.g. in UK). Rubella is typically a relatively mild disease with the exception of pregnancy when it can have severe effects on the foetus. The principal beneficiaries are those becoming pregnant many years later and the unvaccinated in the general population. This isn't contentious. Why is a similar position regarding COVID vaccination?

Harm is not limited to direct medical causes. Parents dying of Covid will cause significant mental and financial harm

But parents can be are vaccinated if they want to. This hopefully will eliminate a need for a mandate on children vaccination.

Same severity as common flu. I got sick from common flu that my kids brought back. The issue here is basically how many percentage you get severe flu vs severe covid. Current covid is significantly milder compare to earlier one just came out from China plus majority has been vaccinated. Current flu is also significantly milder than the one responsible for Spanish or bird flu. Response need to be measured and not a one size fit all. Healthcare (admin side) will love to continue these as they can claim from government. You shouldn't take at face value whatever these healthcare professional is preaching at 100%. You can now go to 10 hospitals and it will be much less severe than if you do so just 9-12mths ago. Even during the height of covid, death rate from covid is around 4% (flu is like undee 0.2%). With 80% almost no symptom. Plus if you actually do extensive test, death rate will be way lower than 4%. Singapore proved that with their exceptionally low death rate due to their exceptional testing (increasing the denominator). My key point here is measured response. At some point we need to get back to normal lives just like the Americans that gone thru Spanish flu, polio and smallpox. The next time people around you talk about how dreadful Omicron is, ask them how many died due to Omicron strain. Ask why healthy infected Omicron is such a serious statistics when people dying or even "maimed" by Omicron is unreported or statistically not "recorded" or "published". Also asked yourself this, flu vaccines have been around for decades and many children did died from common flu, why you and the people you know didn't get flu jab religiously?

Note that in my state at least the omicron variant is at about 90% prevalence; this might indicate even lower risk both for the children and their families.

Keep in mind of course that a chart of the risk of serious illness from the flu by age range looks like a saddle. The risk for those 5-49 is pretty low. But the risk for those 0-4 and 50-64 are both much higher.

Does the saddle look the same for COVID? Newborns are certainly uniquely susceptible to any illness, but I've not seen evidence that toddlers (2-4) are at especially high risk. Does anyone have data on how serious illness affects kids at these ages?

Yes, it does seem to look the same for Covid, see e.g. here [1]. Note that this paper is likely before Delta, and the age bracket 0-4 does not match yours.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2

Thanks for the link. I guess it does look roughly like the trends for the flu, though honestly neither one looks like a saddle to me. A saddle is much more symmetrical, and these look more like linear functions with a small blip on the far left side.

I'd still be interested to know if the 0-4 age group has homogeneous risk, or if the real risk is among 0-6 (or 12) month old babies. I have a 2 year old and we have been very cautious, but haven't seen any evidence that kids this age are at much risk for serious illness or death.

The graph is deceptive; it's a semi-log plot, so the linearity is really exponential.

Good catch! Sounds like this would be an even more uncomfortable saddle than I had imagined...

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nati...

Is there a similar link for hospitalizations? The healthcare one does not group by age.

>May 25, 2021

All those studies should be done again for Omicron as it's significantly different.

Discussion among inpatient pediatric doctors about rising child COVID admissions with omicron:

https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/rpr28r/pediatricia...

As my kid contracted COVID yesterday on his 1st birthday and has a fever of 100.9. Oof.

I’m so sorry

That's a fever, but not a particularly high one, right? 40C/104F is what I'd consider high and that seems to be the norm around here, though I've met parents who wait even beyond that before giving medication. Hope your kid is back on their feet soon!

As the other poster wrote, 100,9F is not particularly high. Here doctors recommend to keep fever below 39° (102,2F). When my child had the flu, we achieved this by alternating between Ibuprofen and Paracetamol in order to keep the doses low.

All the best to you.

We had regular RSV with 100.4 for a few days.

My twins both had Roseola around the same time, when they were about 18 months and had recently entered day care. They both went around 104* F.

Not a really bad fever, and try not to treat it with anything but fluids.. remember that a fever is a more often than not a GOOD thing. its the body raising the alarm system wide. let it do its thing (to a degree, you don't want it too high for too long. obviously. Also seek medical advice from a medical practitioner)

Does this directly contradict this claim? (Not to mention how old this article is... )

US children hospitalized with COVID in near-record numbers https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pande... (that is an ugly ugly link, apologies even though there's not a lot I can do there)

That number I think matches what flu hospitalization is for children.

Otoh (not saying you don't know this) viruses don't just "kill" or "not kill".

They can have serious, life altering changes on people. So just measuring hospitalization or death isn't that useful.

I don't think so. Rate of infection and risk of illness are two separate statistics that may not be correlated. It doesn't mention whether the child hospitalization rate is higher or lower for Covid vs the flu. The near-record numbers are only compared to previous Covid hospitalizations. All that means is we are close to having as many sick children with covid as we have had at any point since the pandemic started. It doesn't say anything about severity compared to flu.

Comparing hospitalization rates with the flu is difficult. If a child has Covid and has moderately severe symptoms, they are probably more likely to go to the hospital than a child with the same level of symptoms and the flu, just because Covid is less familiar. That is especially true if you are looking at flu hospitalizations from pre-pandemic periods. Comparing mortality would probably be more relevant. A child with the Flu in 2019 was probably not going to go to the hospital unless she was turning blue or had an extremely high fever. With Covid i would probably take my child to the hospital if she was having any difficulty breathing, at a threshold much lower than what I would have gotten concerned about for the flu.

That may or may not be a valid distinction for a parent to make. This research suggests that a parent of a child with flu or covid should probably have the same level of precaution.

They specifically refer to the increased rate of hospitalization in the article. Their refutation is that about half of the hospitalizations are actually due to other reasons like broken bones and that mandatory Covid tests uncover an otherwise asymptomatic case. However due to reporting rules, apparently these cases are still considered Covid hospitalizations.

Probably no

There are a lot of respiratory virus and children were already hospitalized at record numbers before omicron

My healthy child has already been on antibiotics 3 separate weeks since September. One chest infection. Keeps coughing. Already had a lot of negative pcr tests because the nursery demands. Every time I go to the GP there are 2 or 3 other children waiting

Article is from May 25, 2021, this is mostly out of date news. Kids younger than 12 (5 years - 11 years) can get the vaccine now, so there's even less cause for concern.

People really seem to struggle with multiple facts.

It is a fact otherwise healthy kids hardly ever have serious COVID infection consequences.

It is a fact they give infections to others who don't do as well.

It is a fact many kids aren't otherwise healthy and have a much higher rate of death and complications.

It is a fact that even a very small rate of deaths or complications is a lot of dead kids when you're a big country like the USA.

Yet people pick only one fact and act like it is the one true fact that trump's all overs.

Newer and larger study: Thirty-Day Outcomes of Children and Adolescents With COVID-19: An International Experience

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/148/3/e20200...

Is this truth? I really do not know.

Why not share the results rather than a link-only comment?

> Dyspnea, bronchiolitis, anosmia, and gastrointestinal symptoms were more common in COVID-19 than influenza. In-hospital prevalent treatments for COVID-19 included repurposed medications (<10%) and adjunctive therapies: systemic corticosteroids (6.8%–7.6%), famotidine (9.0%–28.1%), and antithrombotics such as aspirin (2.0%–21.4%), heparin (2.2%–18.1%), and enoxaparin (2.8%–14.8%). Hospitalization was observed in 0.3% to 1.3% of the cohort diagnosed with COVID-19, with undetectable (n < 5 per database) 30-day fatality. Thirty-day outcomes including pneumonia and hypoxemia were more frequent in COVID-19 than influenza.

this article is from may 2021. I suggest we add a warning to the title since the omicron may cause more harm to children.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/30/omicron-is-sending...

The UK JVCI recommends vaccination only for children who are in contact with immunosuppressed people.

The abrupt shift in official narrative over the last week has been head-spinning

This article is from May 2021.

When we heard Joe Biden say that Covid was the states’ responsibility, and the press not report the complete flip-flop, we knew the stuff was about to hit the fan.

The fact that Psaki gave Trump credit for coming up with the vaccine during a press conference last week, kind of tells you were this is going.

This article is from before Delta and is way out of date. Even at face value at the time, the numbers show that covid is worse than the flu in terms of pediatric deaths. And that was pre-delta and now omicron. Things are likely better now that kids can be vaccinated but even at the time this was a nonsense argument from NPR.

South Africa health minister confirmed that Omicron is a mild variant and is far less dangerous than Delta. It has also been confirmed that children:

1. Have higher chances of getting myocarditis after getting vaccinated.

2. Develop long lasting immunity after being exposed to the virus [1]

That makes me believe that there is absolutely no reason to vaccinate kids.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01089-8

if it's half as likely to send you to the hospital but it spreads four times as quickly, it will still send twice as many people to the hospital.

I mean #1 has been widely debunked and in #2 they didn't test against Delta or Omicron. Maybe the results generalize but from the adult studies we've seen all show reduced neutralizing responses to Delta and Omicron as compared to the original strain.

Prior infection seems better against Delta but omicron is it's own thing as in immunity is not maintained. Interestingly omicron infection may protect against delta however.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/omicron-largely-evade...

"Plasma samples from 19 children and 18 adults at >6 months after primary infection were tested for binding to spike and RBD from Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351) and Gamma (P.1) variants compared to the original Wuhan genotype, which was used in previous assays."

What do you mean debunked? It was NOT debunked. In fact, it has just recently been confirmed. Please, see this research paper - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf – for men <40, dose 2 and dose 3 of Pfizer have more myocarditis than sars-cov-2 infection, and this is true for dose 1 and dose 2 of Moderna. Also, Pfizer boosters (Dose 3) have more myocarditis for men <40 than infection.

COVID causes more cases of myocarditis.

The issue is omicron seems to be spreading, at last from what I've seen, faster than the flu (and unquestionably faster than delta).

Most seasonal flu I've lived through, I've never seen everyone in the household come down with it immediately at the same time. In my home everyone came down with covid, kids and adults, almost exactly at the same time with the same symptoms.

Omicron can be 0.1 times as lethal as delta, but if it spreads to 20 times as many people as delta it will still be twice as deadly.

Clearly we don't have enough information right now to do the calculus, it looks like omicron is less severe, it looks like it's more contagious, but how exactly this balances out seems to be unknown. Though I have seen more hospitals in my region reporting record admissions.

I'm still seeing bars in the area sending out email campaigns encouraging people to come up and party for NYE. It's funny that while requiring vaccines they make no mention of "stay home if you feel sick". Right now I don't think we have enough information to correctly assess the real risk of actively encourage people to gather for NYE, but given what we do know it certainly seems like a risky idea.

edit: I'll add the "as low as" phrasing is a bit odd, since my understanding of past variants is that their risk to children was lower than the flu. This means that, relative to other variants, being "as serious as the flu" would be an upgrade in the level of risk.

The flu can spread very quickly as well. My child's class was hit by the flu 2 years ago, just before COVID lockdowns began. More than 3/4 of the kids in her entire grade got sick at the same time.

We do expect that omicron will likely hit in a similar fashion once it surfaces in her school, despite the indoor/outdoor mask requirements and relatively high levels of child vaccination.

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