Have you ever known a crazy-maker--someone who lied, exaggerated, and caused trouble for its own sake? At some point, it's wise to ignore them or even cut off contact. While we can't stop the corona kiddie crazy-making in the media, we can hold it up to scrutiny by looking at more reliable sources than Nurse Ratched and tabloid journalists working for organizations formerly known as newspapers.
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| Would you take advice from this woman? Stock photo from Pexels. |
If you think I'm exaggerating, the Miami Herald quotes an epidemiologist:
Mary Jo Trepka, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor at Florida International University, said the spike in pediatric hospitalizations over the last week was preventable.
“It’s very unfortunate,” she said. “These kids didn’t even get to make the decisions that are impacting their health.”
Trepka said she is especially concerned about kids starting school again. She urged parents to get their eligible children 12 and older vaccinated. The sooner the better, she said, “because it takes five weeks to get your child fully vaccinated.”
For parents, Trepka advised they send their children back to school with effective face masks, such as an N95 respirator mask, to protect against the more contagious variant.“Just a thin piece of cloth that falls off their nose is going to do nothing for that child,” she said. (emphasis added)
Regardless of your views on COVID, who lets a 12-year-old make their own health care decisions? Or imagines that a kid is going to wear a respirator all day when none of their classmates are?
The vaccine Trepka recommends is still in the experimental stage with only two months' trial data on a few thousand kids and documented side effects in kids, some requiring hospitalization. As we saw back in July, back in June, again in June, and last year, kids have literally a one-in-a-million chance of dying of COVID, and various media stories of kids with COVID have had some significant errors or exaggerations. Who recommends an experimental vaccine with known harms to mitigate such a remote risk? There may be certain children with comorbidities for whom the vaccine would be worth the risk, but she recommends it for "eligible children"--which includes healthy ones. COVID poses about the same level of risk to kids as a bad flu. Two years ago, Trepka would have rightly been dismissed as a paranoid crank.
Has anything changed in the past month--are kids now more vulnerable to COVID? The Miami Herald article noted above begins,
More Florida children were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Tuesday than in any other state, reflecting a rapid rise in serious illness among an age group considered to be at the lowest risk of severe outcomes from the disease and many still not eligible for the vaccine.
A total of 46 pediatric patients were admitted to a Florida hospital with a confirmed infection while an additional 22 were hospitalized with a suspected case, according to the federal government’s hospital capacity data.This is either more crazy-making or mathematical illiteracy. As the third most populous state, Florida is likely to have high totals of every kind of patient compared to almost every other state. I'd like to see the data for myself, but when I click on the links in the quotation, I don't see any information on pediatric COVID cases--in fact, the second link goes to a table whose fields show only adult COVID cases and deaths. Also note the wording, "with a confirmed infection" and "with a suspected case." This suggests the hospitalizations are with COVID, but not necessarily because of COVID. A study of one hospital's records from May 2020 through February 2021 found that almost half of pediatric COVID patients were likely to have been admitted for reasons unrelated to COVID.
As for "cases," if they're going by Florida's weekly situation report, it looks like "cases" are just positive tests, which for most people are asymptomatic infections. Doctors quoted in the article observe a spike in ER visits and "symptomatic" infections in kids, but they don't say whether the symptoms are mild or severe or how many of the kids have comorbidities. A scary sentence appears in the article--"It just went boom.’ ICUs are being overwhelmed with younger — and sicker — patients"--but it's just a link to a separate story about six COVID patients (out of eight) who were under 30. (Yes--it said the hospital ICU was overwhelmed by eight patients. Much farther down, it says there were 55 ICU COVID patients at six Miami hospitals that day, suggesting that's not a typo.)
This muddle of an article, the lumping of "with COVID" and "because of COVID," and Florida's lack of a proper dashboard makes it hard to tell how many kids in Florida are actually hospitalized due to COVID. However, we can look at the CDC's COVID-Net page, which shows hospitalization data from across the US representing about 10% of the population. The site says that cases are "likely underestimated," but we can see if kids make up a larger portion of hospitalizations than before and the trend in hospitalizations. Click to enlarge.
Hospitalizations among kids are going up, but as of July 24 (latest data available), they're similar to what we've seen before. Florida isn't included in the COVID-Net network, so this might not reflect the situation there. But I can't think of a reason that Florida kids would be more susceptible to any variant of COVID than kids in Georgia, Tennessee, or any of the other 12 states with counties in the network.
What about kids and deaths? For kids age 12-17, the CDC reports that weekly deaths were 0.1 per million at July 24. They were zero for kids age 0-11. That's lower than they were last winter.
Again--there might be certain kids who should take the vaccine and that should be determined by their parents or doctor. But I still don't see a justification for vaccinating healthy kids, based on data instead of media crazy-making.
This doctor sums up the situation well in his address to the local school board. The studies Dr. Stocks refers to are linked to here.
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