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With apologies, I'll correct myself: flu kills hundreds, sometimes thousands of children per year. My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of
by nkohari 5y ago
With apologies, I'll correct myself: flu kills hundreds, sometimes thousands of children per year. My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid. It's important to keep that in perspective, is all I'm saying.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid. This is false if you include the period during which COVID-19 has been around in “every year”, because COVID countermeasures also suppress the flu. Without COVID countermeasures, and without vaccination for most kids, COVID would kill far more than the flu normally does. Now, the COVID vaccine right now is more effective than the flu vaccine usually is (but that may be temporary if COVID is endemic and different variants proliferate), so with vaccines available to younger kids than now that might get evened out or reverse, but right now COVID is clearly far more deadly to kids.
- nkohari 5y agoYou can't make a direct comparison between a global pandemic and a normal year for influenza. In future years there won't be as many opportunities for people to be infected with Covid, further reducing the risk. I'm already bored to tears talking about this, though. The only point that I'm trying to make is that we have always accepted a certain level of mortal risk to people, including children. At some point, we are going to have to do that with Covid as well.