Stop Fear-Mongering: Kids Are Safer From Covid-19 Than Everyone Else

By Phil Kerpen

The coronavirus news for kids has been overwhelmingly positive, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo is feeding fear by raising a tenuously connected specter of Kawasaki disease for children.

Just when COVID death rates are declining and recovery appears around the corner in most states, the latest fear is that children are getting sick and are at risk of dying.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is one of those prominently pushing this inaccurate idea. He has emerged as the COVID-19 antihero due to his catastrophic policy of forcing nursing homes to accept infectious patients, which led to a surge in deaths. He has adopted a new tactic to stoke fear and justify his bad decisions: ratcheting up anxiety about the danger to children—the group by far least at risk from coronavirus.

Cuomo is focused on about 100 children in New York hospitalized for Kawasaki disease, an inflammatory condition that affects multiple organ systems of infants and children, and can cause cardiac damage. But the evidence in fact indicates that children are at very low risk of hospitalization or death from the novel coronavirus. The Center for Disease Control’s most recent report shows 12 pediatric COVID deaths total, compared to 174 pediatric flu deaths this season. In the 2018-2019 flu season there were 400 pediatric deaths, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic killed 2,000 children.

COVID deaths are overwhelmingly among the very old in a pronounced J-shaped age distribution, in marked contrast to the classic U-shape of the flu.

The CDC’s weekly COVIDView surveillance report says: “For children (0-17 years), COVID-19 hospitalization rates are much lower than influenza hospitalization rates at comparable time points during recent influenza seasons.” Children overwhelmingly get asymptomatic or mild COVID-19 infections, and recent papers suggest they may either have innate immunity or effective partial immunity from recent exposure to common cold coronaviruses.

International Evidence Finds Low Risk to Kids

There is also a body of evidence that supports this conclusion building internationally. Iceland has the most extensive testing program relative to total population in the world and reports: “Children under 10 are less likely to get infected than adults and if they get infected, they are less likely to get seriously ill. What is interesting is that even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.”

This adds to similar findings in Switzerland: “Even when children are tested positive for the virus, their viral load is often very low. Which would explain why they are bad vectors of the disease. It seems that it is adults who infect children, not the other way around.”

In The Netherlands, experience has found: “The decision to reopen schools is based on a wide range of research which shows that young children are unlikely to pass on the virus or develop serious symptoms themselves, according to Jaap van Dissel, head of the public health institute RIVM. ‘There are no clusters in which schools would appear to be a hot spot,’ Van Dissel said. ‘And the closure of the schools has had no impact on the spread.’”

full story at https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/21/stop-fear-mongering-kids-are-safer-from-covid-19-than-everyone-else/