[loceng]

FTA: "Highlights

• Bulk of COVID-19 per capita deaths occur in elderly with high comorbidities.

• Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children.

• Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term.

• Clinical trials did not address long-term effects most relevant to children.

• High post-inoculation deaths reported in VAERS (very short-term)."

[spockz]

Over here the main reason for vaccinating children is to reduce the infections carried over by children. Not necessarily to spare them from symptoms as most children will just have mild symptoms and less long covid. I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children. They would also be impacted the longest and strongest so if that can be prevented with vaccinations without worse side effects that seems fine to me.

[CryptoPunk]

Herd immunity cannot be established with the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines, due to high transmissibity amongst the vaccinated, and without herd immunity, every one contracting COVID-19 is inevitable, so I don't see a basis in the 'vaccinate to protect others' argument.

As for "long COVID", the best evidence available suggests most cases are misattribution:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.

[r721]

>I’m not sure whether there actually have been intensive studies to long covid in children.

Study from September:

>Up to one in seven (14%) children and young people who caught SARS-CoV-2 may have symptoms linked to the virus 15 weeks later, suggest preliminary findings from the world’s largest study on long Covid in children, led by UCL and Public Health England researchers.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/sep/first-findings-worlds-la...

[CryptoPunk]

The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

[nicoburns]

I haven’t seen formal studies, but the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen is that children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults, but in absolute terms the symptoms are less severe as they start at higher baseline levels of energy, health, etc. but relative to their peers, the effects can still be quite significant.

[gus_massa]

> children are getting lost by covid at the same rate as adults

It's harder to find than what imagined, but the closest data I found is https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

The Table 1 compare the number of death related to covid-19 with the total number of death

* 0-17 years: 678/66,234 ~= 1.0%

* 85 years and over: 212,658/1,897,245 ~= 11.2%

So the risk of dying by covid-19 compared with all the other risk is much smaller for kids than old people. It would be interesting to compare with the total population of each age, but the difference will be bigger.

The problem is that traditional media a social media have a strong sampling bias. A dead of a kid is unusual and it will get more coverage than the dead of a 90 year old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog

[nicoburns]

Hmm.. typo in my original comment. Was meant to say "long covid" not "lost by covid". I agree there's a lot fewer kids dying.