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A Quick (Corrected) Calculation on Child Covid Deaths Jim Naureckas ([link removed])


Jacobin: We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole

Jacobin (9/19/20 ([link removed]) ) 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.

I posted an angry piece on Wednesday (9/23/20) about an interview that was published by Jacobin (9/19/20 ([link removed]) )—and then immediately took it down, because it was based on a misreading of a chart ([link removed]) from the Centers for Disease Control.

While I’m sorry I didn’t catch the mistake before publishing (and grateful to the reader who pointed out my error), I’m glad to be wrong, because my error was thinking that children are considerably more vulnerable to the coronavirus than they actually are.

Looking at the correct numbers ([link removed]) provided by the CDC on Covid-19 cases and deaths, one can calculate the percentage of reported cases for each age group that result in death. For the 0–4 years group, there have been 89,224 reported cases and 34 deaths, for a 0.04% fatality rate. For ages 5–17, it’s 332,192 cases and 58 deaths, or 0.02% fatality. For 18–29, it’s 1,171,828 and 766 deaths, which is 0.07%.

By way of comparison, the CDC reports ([link removed]) a case fatality rate for measles of 0.2%, and for chicken pox ([link removed]) , for children 1–14, of about 0.01%.

The line in the Jacobin interview I took issue with was Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff saying, “Children and young adults have minimal risk, and there is no scientific or public health rationale to close daycare centers, schools or colleges.” While my rebuttal to this claim was based on exaggerated numbers, the question remains: Does a disease that kills two, four or seven young patients in 10,000 qualify as a “minimal risk”? Would epidemiologists say that a new strain of chicken pox that was twice as lethal or more, depending on the age group, and for which we had no immunity to or vaccine for, provided “no scientific or public health rationale” for closing schools?

When Kulldorff assures Jacobin that there is “a more than thousand-fold difference in mortality risk by age,” the interview links to a study by Kulldorff (published on LinkedIn, 4/10/20 ([link removed]) ) that finds extremely low risks of death for children and young adults. But he achieves this through sleight of hand, combining a low risk of infection when exposed with a low risk of death when infected. The policy Kulldorff seems to be advocating, however, is to not try to prevent infection in most children—because, as his colleague Katherine Yih says, “exposures [to the coronavirus] in young, healthy people contribute to the herd immunity that will ultimately benefit all.” So the fact that it may take more exposures to infect a young person than an older person is irrelevant to the question of how risky the policies proposed by Kulldorff and Yih would be.

As FAIR (3/17/20 ([link removed]) , 5/27/20 ([link removed]) ) has argued before, people who promote the idea of accepting Covid infection in pursuit of herd immunity rarely acknowledge the high death toll that such a policy necessarily entails. There are about 20 million children under the age of five in the United States, according to the Census ([link removed]) ; if no steps are taken to prevent them from being infected with the coronavirus, a fatality rate of 0.04% implies a worst-case scenario of 8,000 deaths among them.

There are an estimated 62 million children between the ages of 5–19; applying the 0.02% death rate for reported cases among 5-17-year-olds suggests a possible death toll of 12,000 were they all allowed to be infected. For the 45 million between the ages of 20–29, the 0.07% fatality rate for reported cases among 18-29-year-olds indicates a worst case of 32,000 deaths.

If the US truly tried to pursue a herd immunity strategy, the actual number of deaths among children and young adults would almost certainly be less than these numbers; herd immunity would in fact kick in at some point before every child was infected. And there are no doubt cases of Covid in children and young adults that are not reported to medical authorities, so the true case fatality rates are likely not as high as the figures used in these calculations. But how much lower they might be is based on guesses about when herd immunity would be reached, and how many Covid cases there are that we don’t know about.

It’s safe to say, when almost a hundred children have died when less than 1% of the youth population has reportedly been infected, that a policy that deliberately allows a majority of children to be infected will cause a scale of deaths among children that few parents would consider a “minimal risk.”
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