A Quick Calculation on How Many Kids Jacobin Is Willing to Let Die

Jim Naureckas

Jacobin (9/19/20) platforms two epidemiologists who argue that "exposures [to coronavirus] in young, healthy people contribute to the herd immunity that will ultimately benefit all"—without spelling out the massive death toll such a policy implies.

There is a lot that is fucked up in a Jacobin interview (9/19/20) with two Harvard epidemiologists, Katherine Yih and Martin Kulldorff, but I think the most fucked-up thing of all is Kulldorff’s claim that when it comes to Covid-19, “Children and young adults have minimal risk, and there is no scientific or public health rationale to close daycare centers, schools or colleges.”

The CDC publishes demographic breakdowns on Covid-19 cases and deaths, so you can see what kind of risk children and young adults have. For children under 1 year of age, 10,876 are known to have contracted the disease and 20 have died. That’s a case fatality rate of 0.2%.

For children ages 1–4, 2,083 are known to have come down with the disease and 14 have died. The case fatality rate is 0.7%.

A total of 3,226 cases have been identified in children between 5 and 14 years old—which includes the ages of most elementary and middle school students—and 30 have died. This group’s case fatality rate is 0.9%.

With people from 15–24—which would include most high school and college students—the case total is 20,786, and the death toll is 333. That gives a case fatality rate of 1.6%.

By what standard is a 0.7% chance of a child dying from a disease considered “minimal risk”? Or 0.9%, or 1.6%?

By comparison, the CDC reports a case fatality rate for measles of 0.2%. For whooping cough, it works out to 0.1%. Can you imagine an epidemiologist announcing that there’s a new strain of measles or whooping cough that we have no immunity to or vaccine for, but not to worry—these diseases have “minimal risk”?

Yes, the Covid case counts only includes cases we know about. We don’t know how many cases we don’t know about. Is the idea that we should assume that there are many, many cases we don’t know about, and therefore we can guess that the risk of death is “minimal”? That’s junk science.

There appears to be little or no natural immunity to the Covid coronavirus, and no vaccine appears likely until the end of this school year, if not later. So by bringing children together daily during a pandemic, you risk having the pathogen spread through most of the population.

There are 61 million children under the age of 15 in the United States; 0.7% of that (to use the median fatality rate) is over 400,000 children.  There are 43 million people between the ages of 15 and 24; 1.6% of them is almost 700,000.

The number of deaths surely won’t be that high, even if you allowed the disease to spread among the population unchecked; we would certainly reach that coveted herd immunity status before 100%  of the population is infected, and there are no doubt many cases in young people that don’t come to the attention of medical authorities. But how confident are you in your guesses that herd immunity can be reached relatively quickly, or that unknown cases far outnumber known cases?

If you’re very confident, you can bring those numbers down, maybe into the thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. But you’re still talking about thousands of dead children.

Jacobin should never have published this ghoulish crap.

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