top | item 24083521

(no title)

catalogia | 5 years ago

> and children are dying from this disease, even if at a lower rate than adults (how much lower is a really important question).

The data I've found is:

    Under 1: 15 deaths
    1-4: 10 deaths
    5-14: 20 deaths
    15-24: 225 deaths
The curve continues from there, peaking at 45,845 for 85 years or older. So yes, some kids do die, or at least they had covid when they died. But if this were all covid was, we certainly wouldn't have closed schools for the kids' sake over this. Clearly schools are closed due to the threat posed to teachers.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...

discuss

order

shadowgovt|5 years ago

What does that look like relative to the infection count? That's the numbers I can't get easy access to; it may be the case we've simply successfully kept the disease away from places children frequent.

I'm hoping that's not the dominant factor in the numbers, because school re-opening will be real ugly if it is.

em500|5 years ago

The Dutch CDC (locally known as RIVM) concluded that risk to young children is very low, and Dutch schools have been open since early May based on this understanding.

In the Netherlands, 0.6% of the reported hospitalisations involved children under the age of 18, and 0 death have been reported under this age. Here's the summary page of the RIVM: https://www.rivm.nl/en/novel-coronavirus-covid-19/children-a...

Some googling reveals only corroborating reports that the case fatality (CFR) rate among young children is very low:

https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/sites/know4pol/files/j...

https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatalit...

https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...

AFAICT if you just try to synthesize the existing research without prejudice, you'd have to conclude that the risk of young children dying from COVID-19 is very low.

Whether there is much risk of children -> adult transmission is more difficult to answer.

catalogia|5 years ago

> it may be the case we've simply successfully kept the disease away from places children frequent.

That might be true to a degree, however the discrepancy is so huge, 2-3 orders of magnitude, that it should be pretty clear kids really do have much less to fear. I think some Olympic-level contortionism is needed to come to any other conclusion.