| haxxiy said: To be fair, "twice as likely to be reinfected" can be the difference between 90% and 95% risk reduction. On the other hand, that 95% is incredibly powerful. It's literally off the ELISA charts when you try to measure it, neutralizing not only any SARS-CoV-2 variant but also other Sarbecoviruses. Hopefully the same goes when the opposite happens and someone has a symptomatic breakthrough infection. The whole kid Covid debate is also rather strange. There have been ~ 360 deaths in the under 18 age group in the US since the beginning of the pandemic - that's less than the deaths from influenza in most years in the past decade, and less than a third of those who died in the 2009 pandemic in that age group. "ICUs full of children dying from Covid-19" seems rather alarmistic and inaccurate in face of that data, unless they use the same expression to describe influenza in... well, just about every winter in a pediatric ward, really. |
Yeah that last part stood out to me as well, didn't expect that kind of writing from the otherwise level headed reporting.
I looked a bit deeper for actual numbers
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/children-hospitalized-with-covid-19-us-hits-record-number-2021-08-14/
The number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States hit a record high of just over 1,900 on Saturday, as hospitals across the South were stretched to capacity fighting outbreaks caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant.
That's still just 2.4% of total hospitalizations due to Covid-19
A bit more recent numbers
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/
As of August 26, nearly 4.8 million children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic. About 204,000 cases were added the past week, marking the second week with child cases at the level of the winter surge of 2020-21. After declining in early summer, child cases have increased exponentially, with over a five-fold increase the past month, rising from about 38,000 cases the week ending July 22nd to nearly 204,000 the past week.
That is quite alarming but severe cases are still rare
At this time, it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children. However, there is an urgent need to collect more data on longer-term impacts of the pandemic on children, including ways the virus may harm the long-term physical health of infected children, as well as its emotional and mental health effects.
Considering they're hesitant to give children the vaccine, just in case any long term effects might arise, it's rather odd to let them all get Covid-19 instead...
