A common claim on social media is that children rarely get sick from Covid-19 and are not dying of Covid-19 unless they have pre-existing conditions. Let's look at the facts.
My sincerest condolences to the family. Mr. Quincy Drone and Ms. Lastassija White, my thoughts are of you and your beautiful daughter.
The Early Trends
The idea that only children that have comorbidities are getting sick from Covid or dying is due to the early data in March 2020 that did clearly show this trend. However, it was a trend, it never showed that ONLY children with comorbidities were getting sick or dying.
The Wrong, The Assumptive, and The Ugly
An article at TrialSite news is being shared on Social Media in which the author's sub-heading reads:
No Children have Died in U.S. without Pre-existing Conditions
It is surprising that the author would publish such a sub-heading because we don't know if this is true. It most likely is not true.
The author(s), TrialSiteStaff, whoever those people are, entitled the article, 'A Mainstream Academic Research Superstar Starts to Question Things'. Who is this "superstar"? The author is referring to an article by Dr. Marty Makary that was published in the Wall Street Journal online. Dr. Makary, an advocate against vaccinating children and the Editor-in-Chief of MedPageToday.com. Dr. Makay is also known as the expert that stated that we'll have heard immunity by April and that he's only getting one dose of the mRNA vaccine. Dr. Makay is urging caution about vaccinating children due to a lack of evidence that he and his team have uncovered that children do not get seriously ill with Covid enough to die. This matches the TrialSiteStaff's beliefs so he wrote about it. Fair enough. The problem though is that the author(s) is obviously unaware that Dr. Makary's data included only 3 children who died of Covid-19. The database, from which this data was pulled, included 2,753 Covid-19 deaths. Which reflected that 0.11% were children. Well, 0.11% equals 3 pediatric deaths. As my colleague, Dr. Anthony Cox states, "It is simply not possible to generalize about their characteristics after examining data on only 3 of them."
According to the latest numbers, over 345 children have died of Covid-19 in the US(1). Dr. Makary would have the public believe that all of these children had preexisting conditions.
Do Children Get Really Sick from Covid-19?
Yes, and it is increasing(2). The COVID-NET hospital database shows that (46%) of the ~30,000 children hospitalized with Covid-19 had NO pre-existing conditions. This equates then to around 14,000 children that were healthy; yet, they needed hospitalization due to Covid-19. This does not comport with the popular narrative that children don't get very sick with Covid, more specifically, only children with comorbidities. See the graphic below:
The data is clear, healthy children are getting horribly sick from Covid. Additionally, what many of the advocates for herd immunity are unaware of is that Covid-19 is causing a number of syndromes in children that were completely avoidable(3). Due to cellular damage caused by inflammation, infected children are experiencing syndromes such as fatigue, mental dysfunction, sudden stoppages in breathing, chest pain, joint pain, and an overall decline in their quality of life months after infection. Covid-19 is causing morbidity! These children are suffering, and they didn't have to. This is not a cold or the flu.
The Trail Site's staff then go on to discuss its misunderstanding of the VAERS data which I discuss here. The author(s) also then begin to discuss that this whole Covid thing is being used as a political weapon. Note that there was zero evidence or a reason why this would or could be the case. I'm also curious what part is being used as a weapon. The truth?
The Trial Site's Staff and claims can be confidently dismissed.
Claim: Healthy Children are not dying of Covid-19.
Status: Unproven: Highly Likely to be NOT true.
References:
Comments