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by shadowgovt 2139 days 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.
2 comments
em500 2139 days 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.

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selykg 2139 days ago
The risk to young children is low. But not having symptoms or being low death rate doesn't mean shit.

Kids require adults to take care of them. That means those kids who may have the infection could VERY easily spread it to higher risk people.

They aren't immune, they still get the virus, they can still spread it. That is not immune. They just don't show symptoms like older people. That's not an immunity.

On top of that we don't know the long term effects of this thing. While kids may not show symptoms what long term effects might this have on kids? There's still a huge risk there.

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matz1 2139 days ago
>not having symptoms or being low death rate doesn't mean shit.

It means a lot, its a good news, it means the virus is not that dangerous.

>On top of that we don't know the long term effects of this thing

Sure but there also long term effect of kids not going to school in person, that is bigger risk.

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shadowgovt 2139 days ago
Not going to school in person isn't fatal.
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matz1 2138 days ago
Going to school is unlikely to be fatal either. The benefit of going to school is greater than the risk of covid.

If you are really really that paranoid, you can home school your kids.

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em500 2139 days ago
> They aren't immune, they still get the virus, they can still spread it. That is not immune.

I never claimed they are, so I don't know what you're actually replying to here.

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catalogia 2139 days 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.

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