Skip to main content

Is the Delta Variant a Threat to Kids?

 The latest COVID news is out of Mississippi:



This is disturbing--nobody wants to hear about kids in intensive care. But it's important to stop and think and do some research before reacting. Since I don't see any reporters asking pertinent questions, I will. 

Are the kids in ICU only because of COVID or for another illness as well? Unknown. As we saw last year, several reports of kids dying of COVID turned out to be misleading: the kids died of unrelated causes, but had a positive test for COVID. In one case, a baby that was miscarried didn't even have COVID, but its mother did.

Do these kids have comorbidities? Unknown.

Is this typical? This, we can answer: no. The CDC reports that as of July 3, there were 18 people age 0-17 in the The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)-Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network (COVID-NET). The network represents about 10% of the US population. Therefore, we can assume there were 180 kids in the hospital with COVID in the US. That's a rate of .54 kids per million, whereas 12 kids in Mississippi is 4 per million. That's more than seven times the national rate.

Laboratory confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations by age representing ~10% of the US population.  Source: CDC.

Is it because of the delta variant? We don't know which variant the kids have, but the delta variant is the dominant one in Mississippi. Here's a graph of the hospitalizations in Mississippi over time--it doesn't look like the variant is sending many people to the hospital:

Hospitalizations Trends. Source: MS Department of Health.

The delta variant is also the main variant here in Indiana, too, and we have a more detailed hospital dashboard. Here are hospitalizations by age group for the past the months, and for comparison, the same time last year:

2021 Hospitalizations by age and sex in Indiana. Source: Regenstreif dashboard.


2020 Hospitalizations by age and sex in Indiana. Source: Regenstreif dashboard.

There were fewer kids in the hospital this year compared to the same dates last year before the delta variant existed, suggesting that kids aren't any more vulnerable to the delta variant than the original. 

The delta variant took over Scotland months ago, but they haven't had a surge in hospitalizations of kids, either. As I mentioned last month, 

Steve Turner, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health registrar and consultant paediatrician at Royal Aberdeen Children’s hospital, said, “As it stands there are very few children in hospital in Scotland and across the whole of the UK due to covid. We’re not seeing any evidence of an increase in paediatric admissions with covid. A very small number of admissions who test positive for covid is what we’d expect.

“Our experience over the last 15 months is that many children who test positive have come into hospital for something else, like broken bones. At the moment the situation in the UK is stable. The number of children in hospital with covid remains very low.”6

Sebastian Rushworth, MD recently addressed MIS-C in children. In case you missed it, 

There are around 73,000,000 children in the [US]. What that means is that the risk of a child in the US having experienced MIS-C up to now is 0,006% (one in 18,000). In other words, MIS-C is rare. And of the children who are unfortunate enough to get it, more than 99% recover. Out of 73,000,000 children in the US, only 37 have actually died of MIS-C over the course of the pandemic (one in 1,970,000).

Rushworth doesn't think COVID is a threat to children in Sweden, his home country, any more than in the US. 

The 12 Mississippi kids are in intensive care at seven times the national rate of hospitalization, and it's not because of the delta variant. There's to be more to this story than what's being told--which is very little. 

Further reading: 
http://relievemypain.blogspot.com/2021/06/fact-checking-fact-checkers-kids-and.html
http://relievemypain.blogspot.com/2021/06/covid-shots-for-kids-uk-and-german.html

Update: The original tweet is unavailable because Dobbs issued a correction--but no answers to the original questions, some of which people are asking in the comments.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...
24 comments
Read more

We Hate the ADA; Why does the Perfect Health Diet Get a Pass?

Some people keep touting the Perfect Health Diet as low-carb, but carb levels that are mostly in the triple digits aren't generally regarded as low-carb; in fact, one of the authors says low-carb diets are unhealthy. A lot of us hate the  American Diabetes Association's advice for diabetics: start with 45g to 60g of carbohydrate per meal and go higher or lower from there. That's 135g to 180g of carb. Perfect Health Diet advice for diabetics: eat 20% to 30% of your diet as carbohydrate. On 2,000 calories, that's 100g to 150g of carb. On 1,700 calories, that's 85 to 128g; on 2,200 calories, that's 112 to 168g. Depending on your carb and calorie intake, carbs would be 85g to 168g per day. That's not a mile off from the ADA's recommendations. Paul Jaminet, one of the authors of the Perfect Health Diet, says, "the basic biology here is that the body's physiology is optimized for a carbohydrate intake of about 30%." He warns against a ...
14 comments
Read more

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder . ...
18 comments
Read more

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more

A Reason to Eat Red Meat, Fat, Eggs and Salt

It looks like Reason magazine has been reading about my diet...or maybe just studies showing no associations between red meat and mortality, saturated fat and heart disease, stroke or cardiovascular disease, or salt consumption and disease. Summarizing published research from the past few years, the article calls the government's dietary advice of the past forty years a fiasco of misinformation,  even noting there's a positive association between a low-sodium diet and death. It adds that the US government's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has dropped their long crusade against cholesterol. The article explains, Observational studies [which the government relied on] may be good at developing hypotheses, but they are mostly not a good basis for making behavioral recommendations and imposing regulations. It's refreshing for the mainstream media to recognize that mainstream dietary advice hasn't been working instead of parroting the same misinformation. T...
17 comments
Read more