O Bayes, where art thou? Life is tragic. A tiny fraction of kids die of covid. A tiny fraction of kids die of flu. A tiny fraction of kids die of RSV. A tiny f

O Bayes, where art thou? Life is tragic. A tiny fraction of kids die of covid. A tiny fraction of kids die of flu. A tiny fraction of kids die of RSV. A tiny fraction of kids die of bacterial pneumonia. While the effects of covid can be severe, we need to recover our perspective: how prevalent is the worst cause scenario, death or significant long term lung impairment? There are 2 studies the article comments about. * One study from Sweden was based on a pre-existing long-term study and found no measurable lung impairment. Possibly simply because nobody in their sample developed severe respiratory symptoms. Given that 27% did have covid IG, seems that the risk for measurable long covid in kids is on the tiny side of things. Note that their sample, while small (661), was deemed statistically significant for the purposes of the long-term study, which started long before covid. * One study from Germany where they focused on kids with covid. They excluded those with 'severe acute respiratory covid infection', true, but their method says nothing about how prevalent 'severe acute respiratory covid infection' is in kids. That could be as small as 1:100k or lower, we wouldn't know without additional data (see e.g. first study). Edit: After reading the full text, I have to say this study is too technical / too small of a sample size and not sure what the layman takeaways are. Their qualitative assessment: 'our study is the first to compare pulmonary function in symptomatic and asymptomatic children and adolescents with and without evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection; no difference between these two groups was observed. Even most patients with persistent respiratory symptoms did not show impaired lung capacity. Severity of infection proved to be the only predictor for mild pulmonary function changes. To conclude, our findings suggest that children and adolescents after SARS-CoV-2 infection do not suffer from persistent deterioration of respiratory function, including body plethysmography, multiple-breath washout and diffusion capacity testing.' In short: Study #1, statistically significant sample of young population, no long term lung impairment. Study #2, perhaps too technical for a layman conversation. Edit. The full study #2, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.22.21259273v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.22.21259273v....