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I've got a child under 12, and while everyone in my household over 12 is vaccinated, I'm not sure if the vaccine has any point for him. If you look at CDC stats

I've got a child under 12, and while everyone in my household over 12 is vaccinated, I'm not sure if the vaccine has any point for him. If you look at CDC stats, today there are only 412 reported covid19 deaths in the 0-17 age group, 138 in the 0-4 group, meaning 274 in the 4-17 group out of 670,000. Furthermore, kids rarely need treatment, so most infections go undiagnosed. While I have no objection to a vaccine, and I don't question the efficacy of these, the trivial chance of my son's covid19 complications versus forcing him to a doctor's office over his fear of needles, which will cause him a lot of angst, makes me question whether to do it. These decisions aren't always entirely about death percentages.

Mikealcl 5y ago
Not sure how accurate that is based on the children’s hospitals in the southern United States being at capacity from COVID. Long symptoms have also become an issue in children.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  >Long symptoms have also become an issue in children. Source?
  - wpietri 5y ago
    If you'd like to appear serious, I'd recommend doing a little basic googling before asking anybody for a source. Maybe this isn't true for you, but there are plenty of querulous people who ask for information that are not sincerely interested, but just work to wear out their opponents.
    - hpoe 5y ago
      I'd recommend when you decide to make claims you go ahead and provide a source rather than becoming passive-aggressive and telling someone it isn't your job to educate them.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        I did not make any claims here, bub. Source: scroll up.
        alex_smart 5y ago
        If we can try to not turn this place into Reddit, that would be great. Asking a source for an imprecise, sensational-sounding claim doesn't deserve this level of hostility.
    - outworlder 5y ago
      Also known as sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I would agree with you if I was questioning water fluoridation or if vaccines gave people autism. A request to support a claim about the "long term" effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago, in a rapidly changing environment, for which it seems pretty improbable for there to have already been robust, repeated, falsifiable studies done, is different.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        Long Covid in children is an established phenomenon. Which you would know if you had typed "long Covid in children" into Google and looked quickly through the top results. I would also suggest that if you want "robust, repeated, falsifiable studies" for "effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago" you have set your standard implausibly high. That's not how medicine progresses for urgent things, because it's fantastically negligent. Contrast the rapid global Covid response, which saved millions of lives, with the incredible foot-dragging surrounding AIDS in the 80s. If we had waited for perfect knowledge before taking action, hospitals would have been stacking bodies in the streets. At this stage you get papers saying things like, "A quarter of children experienced persistent symptoms months after hospitalization with acute covid-19 infection, with almost one in ten experiencing multi-system involvement. [...] Our findings highlight the need for replication and further investigation [...]". [1] [1] https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/06/10/13993003.01341-2021 https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/06/10/1399300...
    - loeg 5y ago
      Being skeptical of "Long COVID" claims around (typically) asymptomic or mild COVID cases in children is reasonable. Nevertheless, we should vaccinate children -- ordinary acute COVID is bad enough, and of course they are still a transmission vector. Long COVID isn't well-defined in general; some large subset of it is psychosomatic. The main non-psychosomatic problem seems to be fallout from ARDS (Acute Respitory Distress Syndrome), which is directly related to severe bouts of COVID (and generally younger people have less severe COVID, with or without vaccines). https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinking-more-critically-speaking-cautiously-long-covid/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinkin...
  - baseh 5y ago
    >https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7#ref-CR2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7#ref-CR2 >https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/
    - sk2020 5y ago
      “Long Covid” symptoms are unfalsifiable.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Thanks! Based on the nature.com link, it looks like there needs to be more time and work done to make concrete claims (as I suspected with something as complicated as "long covid"). I would also be interested in seeing comparisons to "long <other infectious diseases>".
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  I'd like to see a better definition of what "long COVID" is. The minimum definition I see most often is symptoms lasting longer than 3 weeks. I've never had a cold where all symptoms were gone at the 3 week mark. We have been made to associate the term "long COVID" with debilitating illness lasting many months, talk of people joining online support groups, etc. I'd like a better breakdown of what is common. Edit: Downvotes why? It isn't reasonable to want to know how many people are having "any symptom at all past 3 weeks" and how many are suffering from debilitating syndromes?
  - grepfru_it 5y ago
    Never ending fatigue, random muscle and joint pains, blood pressure fluctuations, constant low-grade headache, numbness of extremities, tinnitus, shortness of breath, chest pain, tachycardia, back pain, anxiety and depression.. and usually its combination of the above that come and go continuously in what seems like waves. There are probably more symptoms I’m missing, but that is what I experienced for 9 months
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toiletfuneral 5y ago
My partner is a nurse, and something I think that gets lots a lot in discussing these stats is that many times 'surviving' doesn't mean 'back to normal like nothing happened". Her stories of it radically complicating totally unrelated illnesses and the potential severe long term effects are more than enough reason to take precautions seriously despite what group or demographic you might be in.
- rurp 5y ago
  I think about this a lot but almost never hear it brought up, so I agree that the point gets overlooked often. For every death there are probably many people experiencing serious effects. Anyone who has experienced significant long term health problems knows that they can have a massive impact on your life. This reminds me of a bad take that comes up from time to time around war casualties. Some will see that only a thousand soldiers out of a million died in some conflict and think that it wasn't that dangerous, but for every death in war there can be dozens of people who suffer severe mental and physical harm that negatively affects the rest of their life.
fspeech 5y ago
From family experience: Covid can definitely hit kids much harder than the common cold and they can transmit to vaccinated parents.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
IMO the issue is children & schools are the perfect combination for the spread of illnesses. While no one wants to make definitive statements on how much the vaccine reduces the duration & level of contagiousness -> it is almost certainly not 0%. I think as long as the vaccine is an option for all/most ages then it isn't much of an issue. Although it would be interesting if we allowed kids to get the vaccine at school - possibly without parental permission. (Sort of a tricky area... I think some places provide the HPV vaccine like this since some parents won't let their kids get it.)
HWR_14 5y ago
A large number of the breakthrough cases I'm (personally) aware of are coming from unvaccinated kids to their parents. I would definitely vaccinate your child once it's approved for under 12 - for your whole family's sake. Then tell them they're doing it to protect their family and let them feel like a brave hero.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Why wouldn't you just have the vulnerable adults get vaccinated? At what point will done of these people just start vaccinating in the womb or just treat it like circumcision? Circumcision is not needed but might as well just poke babies with needles immediately after their born to make sure we traumatize them as much as possible.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > Why wouldn't you just have the vulnerable adults get vaccinated? My comment covered breakthrough cases. Those occur among the vaccinated.

Mikealcl 5y ago

Not sure how accurate that is based on the children’s hospitals in the southern United States being at capacity from COVID. Long symptoms have also become an issue in children.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
>Long symptoms have also become an issue in children. Source?
- wpietri 5y ago
  If you'd like to appear serious, I'd recommend doing a little basic googling before asking anybody for a source. Maybe this isn't true for you, but there are plenty of querulous people who ask for information that are not sincerely interested, but just work to wear out their opponents.
  - hpoe 5y ago
    I'd recommend when you decide to make claims you go ahead and provide a source rather than becoming passive-aggressive and telling someone it isn't your job to educate them.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      I did not make any claims here, bub. Source: scroll up.
      - alex_smart 5y ago
        If we can try to not turn this place into Reddit, that would be great. Asking a source for an imprecise, sensational-sounding claim doesn't deserve this level of hostility.
  - outworlder 5y ago
    Also known as sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I would agree with you if I was questioning water fluoridation or if vaccines gave people autism. A request to support a claim about the "long term" effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago, in a rapidly changing environment, for which it seems pretty improbable for there to have already been robust, repeated, falsifiable studies done, is different.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Long Covid in children is an established phenomenon. Which you would know if you had typed "long Covid in children" into Google and looked quickly through the top results. I would also suggest that if you want "robust, repeated, falsifiable studies" for "effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago" you have set your standard implausibly high. That's not how medicine progresses for urgent things, because it's fantastically negligent. Contrast the rapid global Covid response, which saved millions of lives, with the incredible foot-dragging surrounding AIDS in the 80s. If we had waited for perfect knowledge before taking action, hospitals would have been stacking bodies in the streets. At this stage you get papers saying things like, "A quarter of children experienced persistent symptoms months after hospitalization with acute covid-19 infection, with almost one in ten experiencing multi-system involvement. [...] Our findings highlight the need for replication and further investigation [...]". [1] [1] https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/06/10/13993003.01341-2021 https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/06/10/1399300...
  - loeg 5y ago
    Being skeptical of "Long COVID" claims around (typically) asymptomic or mild COVID cases in children is reasonable. Nevertheless, we should vaccinate children -- ordinary acute COVID is bad enough, and of course they are still a transmission vector. Long COVID isn't well-defined in general; some large subset of it is psychosomatic. The main non-psychosomatic problem seems to be fallout from ARDS (Acute Respitory Distress Syndrome), which is directly related to severe bouts of COVID (and generally younger people have less severe COVID, with or without vaccines). https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinking-more-critically-speaking-cautiously-long-covid/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinkin...
- baseh 5y ago
  >https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7#ref-CR2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7#ref-CR2 >https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/
  - sk2020 5y ago
    “Long Covid” symptoms are unfalsifiable.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Thanks! Based on the nature.com link, it looks like there needs to be more time and work done to make concrete claims (as I suspected with something as complicated as "long covid"). I would also be interested in seeing comparisons to "long <other infectious diseases>".
nsxwolf 5y ago
I'd like to see a better definition of what "long COVID" is. The minimum definition I see most often is symptoms lasting longer than 3 weeks. I've never had a cold where all symptoms were gone at the 3 week mark. We have been made to associate the term "long COVID" with debilitating illness lasting many months, talk of people joining online support groups, etc. I'd like a better breakdown of what is common. Edit: Downvotes why? It isn't reasonable to want to know how many people are having "any symptom at all past 3 weeks" and how many are suffering from debilitating syndromes?
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  Never ending fatigue, random muscle and joint pains, blood pressure fluctuations, constant low-grade headache, numbness of extremities, tinnitus, shortness of breath, chest pain, tachycardia, back pain, anxiety and depression.. and usually its combination of the above that come and go continuously in what seems like waves. There are probably more symptoms I’m missing, but that is what I experienced for 9 months

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

toiletfuneral 5y ago

My partner is a nurse, and something I think that gets lots a lot in discussing these stats is that many times 'surviving' doesn't mean 'back to normal like nothing happened". Her stories of it radically complicating totally unrelated illnesses and the potential severe long term effects are more than enough reason to take precautions seriously despite what group or demographic you might be in.

rurp 5y ago
I think about this a lot but almost never hear it brought up, so I agree that the point gets overlooked often. For every death there are probably many people experiencing serious effects. Anyone who has experienced significant long term health problems knows that they can have a massive impact on your life. This reminds me of a bad take that comes up from time to time around war casualties. Some will see that only a thousand soldiers out of a million died in some conflict and think that it wasn't that dangerous, but for every death in war there can be dozens of people who suffer severe mental and physical harm that negatively affects the rest of their life.

fspeech 5y ago

From family experience: Covid can definitely hit kids much harder than the common cold and they can transmit to vaccinated parents.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

IMO the issue is children & schools are the perfect combination for the spread of illnesses. While no one wants to make definitive statements on how much the vaccine reduces the duration & level of contagiousness -> it is almost certainly not 0%. I think as long as the vaccine is an option for all/most ages then it isn't much of an issue. Although it would be interesting if we allowed kids to get the vaccine at school - possibly without parental permission. (Sort of a tricky area... I think some places provide the HPV vaccine like this since some parents won't let their kids get it.)

HWR_14 5y ago

A large number of the breakthrough cases I'm (personally) aware of are coming from unvaccinated kids to their parents. I would definitely vaccinate your child once it's approved for under 12 - for your whole family's sake. Then tell them they're doing it to protect their family and let them feel like a brave hero.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
encryptluks2 5y ago
Why wouldn't you just have the vulnerable adults get vaccinated? At what point will done of these people just start vaccinating in the womb or just treat it like circumcision? Circumcision is not needed but might as well just poke babies with needles immediately after their born to make sure we traumatize them as much as possible.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > Why wouldn't you just have the vulnerable adults get vaccinated? My comment covered breakthrough cases. Those occur among the vaccinated.