While I would have made the point differently than the GP—your children are not at serious risk from COVID because of their age. (They are at some risk—life involves risk—but it’s low.)
The people seriously at risk from COVID are unvaccinated adults.
covid absolutely is a danger to kids, it's just less of a danger than to old people. the question is whether risk of vaccination is significantly less than risk of covid. we don't really know yet, but i'd surely vaccinate my kids if it meant they couldn't transmit the disease to their grandparents.
it's worth the OP trying to find data on how much risk covid presents to their children and what the risks of the vaccine are. the UK has this risk calculator for COVID in adults: https://qcovid.org/ . I'm not sure if there is anything similar for children. probably, the risk of the vaccine or covid is so low for children it doesn't really matter what you do.
He’s saying, that unvaccinated kids are at a lower risk for serious COVID than is a vaccinated adult. It’s true as far as I can tell. So far, COVID has proved to be quite low on the list of things that kill kids. The ratio of fear to danger is / was way out of whack vs other things on that list.
> are we concerned that there is a similar risk to younger folks who got COVID
Children's ACE2 receptors are more resilient to damage, which is likely why they have only ~50% the risk of long covid as compared with a fully vaccinated adult. So yes, it's definitely a risk, but a smaller one.
That said, as an adult you can likely mitigate any cardiovascular damage at least somewhat by taking an ACE inhibitor to up-regulate your ACE2 receptors, whereas without medical training that probably wouldn't be especially safe or ethical to do on your kids.
The flu is also deadly for 65 year olds. Will your parent refuse to work during flu season when the risk of getting infected from a child is much, much higher than with covid?
Yes. The risk of this is pretty miniscule I think.
> Of course, there's "long covid" and all the sort of long tail risks and concerns, but intuitively it feels like if the disease is not that deadly and dangerous when you're that young, there'd also be less risk of all these other side effects we're seeing, which tend to correlate, as far as I can tell, with how severe the disease was for the person in the first place.
Not so much. I'm in a facebook group for long covid sufferers (and anyone who is interested), and there are quite a few people saying their children are suffering from long covid symptoms (less severe in absolute terms compared to adults due to higher baseline energy in children, but still significantly affecting their lives).
I've heard +10% of people are getting long covid, and that it doesn't correlate strongly with the severity of the disease.
Overall I think it is a little tricky to judge with kids. One thing I would add that you may not have considered is that being vaccinated doesn't necessarily preclude gaining natural immunity in future.
I wasn't actually talking about children, however, while they themselves are not at elevated risk from COVID, children are little filth monsters who spread disease to everyone around them. The risk is they pass it on, and we are talking about aggregate population risk.
Nothing is risk-free, and demanding 80 years of data to know a vaccine has absolutely no long-term results when vaccine risk profiles are pretty well understood is not a reasonable ask.
The problem I see is that it is applied to everyone. Children have an extremely low risk profile and the potential side effects might surpass a covid infection by some magnitudes.
Coronavirus's risk to children is low. It's not true that there are no mitigations for Covid: children in the UK are being vaccinated against Covid, as often happens against winter flu.
Measures to protect adults against coronavirus have not come for free for children. Mental health referrals amongst children have doubled since before the pandemic [1]. In more unintended consequences, smoking amongst young people has also surged [2].
Now that we have the vaccine in the UK, and most adults and the vulnerable are vaccinated, I'm against anything that further disrupts a normal childhood, as at this stage, measures would be causing more harm than good.
> We _now_ know that children are at a very low risk, people under 40 are very low risk.
… at very low risk of death, but there seems to be increasing evidence that some COVID-19 survivors, including children, suffer serious, and possibly permanent health effects.
Under 5 children are not susceptible to covid by any large measure and this has been the science since the beginning of the pandemic. If you have children without co-morbidities and you're running around in fear of them dying from covid you have health anxiety issues. Your fear is not justified by data whatsoever.
The people seriously at risk from COVID are unvaccinated adults.
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