Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children, Nature, 15 July 2021
3 November 2021
Studies find that overall risk of death or severe disease from COVID-19 is very low in kids.
A comprehensive analysis of hospital admissions and reported deaths across England suggests that COVID-19 carries a lower risk of dying or requiring intensive care among children and young people than was previously thought.…….
In a series of preprints published on medRxiv1–3, a team of researchers picked through all hospital admissions and deaths reported for people younger than 18 in England. The studies found that COVID-19 caused 25 deaths in that age group between March 2020 and February 2021.
About half of those deaths were in individuals with an underlying complex disability with high health-care needs, such as tube feeding or assistance with breathing.
In one of the preprints, the researchers trawled for published accounts of COVID-19 among children and young people, and ultimately analysed data from 57 studies and 19 countries3. They then picked apart risk factors for severe disease and death from the data.
For the other two preprints, the researchers focused on England, drawing on nationwide health-care data on intensive-care admissions and deaths among those under 18 years old.
Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range. None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause.
Taken together, the unusually comprehensive studies could provide some comfort to parents who have been shielding children who they thought might be vulnerable to severe complications from COVID-19. “There’s a general feeling among paediatricians that probably too many children were shielded during the first wave of the pandemic,” Russell Viner, who studies adolescent health at the University College London, told reporters.
In some cases, those efforts might have done more harm than good, added Elizabeth Whittaker, an infectious-disease specialist at Imperial College London. “Shields are very leaky,” she said. “The shields have not been perfect, and have probably caused more stress and anxiety for families than benefit.”
In these studies about children, it was estimated that the virus caused 50 percent of the COVID-19 deaths. This is probably an overestimate. The US CDC reckons that the percentage of COVID-19 deaths that can be assumed to be caused mainly by the virus and not another illness is 6 percent.
However, even using the high estimate that fifty percent of deaths in COVID-19 were chiefly caused by the virus, the result is that 99.9999 percent of the under 18 years old young people are not killed by the virus SARS-CoV-2. The figure for 4 to 11 year old is probably even lower.
“COVID rarely kills children, even compared with influenza, against which many children are already vaccinated. Our data show that mortality COVID-19 is similar to flu, or less, in children whilst being the opposite in adults.”
From: Children's mortality from COVID-19 compared with all-deaths and other relevant causes of death: epidemiological information for decision-making by parents, teachers, clinicians and policymakers, S. Bhopal, J. Bagaria, and R. Bhopal
Public Health. 2020 Aug; 185: 19–20.
There is yet no research that contradicts the above figures.
Without vaccination 99.9999 percent of children are protected from dying in Covid. More info on this.
Compare this to the already published, still unknown and future adverse effects of the vaccines, and don’t forget that Pfizer themselves are honest enough to say that additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. Learn more.