wrongun love how Alistair constantly ignores the possibility of Long Covid / associated diseases with regards to his children …. its just, “well they wont die”
alistair Long covid among kids, show me any evidence/data and I will take a look. I have read that statistically they have a 99.9% recovery rate. My kids had it over Christmas and they experienced a runny nose and loss of taste for a few days.
Here’s the latest, published last month:
“Less than 1 in 20 children with COVID-19 have symptoms lasting longer than 4 weeks, and by 8 weeks, almost all have recovered, according to a study yesterday in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.”
[…]
"Researchers from King’s College London used the UK ZOE COVID Symptom Study app from September 2020 to February 2021, coinciding with the reopening of schools, to look at 1,734 children 5 to 17 who had parents or caretakers logging possible symptoms.
The most common recorded symptoms for children with positive COVID-19 tests were headache (62.2%) and fatigue (55.0%), followed by fever in children ages 5 to 11 (43.7%) and sore throat in children ages 12 to 17 (51.0%).
Thirty-seven children presented at hospitals for care, but the study does not mention any deaths. By 4 weeks after symptom onset, 4.4% children still had symptoms, which diminished to 1.8% by 8 or more weeks.
On average, COVID-19 lasted 6 days, and in the first week, children had a median of 3 symptoms. "
[…]
“Our data highlight that other illnesses, such as colds and flu, can also have prolonged symptoms in children and it is important to consider this when planning for paediatric health services during the pandemic and beyond,” said senior author Michael Absoud, PhD, in a Lancet press release."
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/long-covid-19-rare-children-study-says
In line with what the senior author says in the comment above, it is worth remembering that it’s not entirely uncommon for kids to also have flu symptoms lasting about a month, e.g. Johns Hopkins website points out that:
“Most children recover from the flu within a week. But they may still feel very tired for as long as 3 to 4 weeks.”
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/influenza/influenza-flu-in-children
TLDR - kids won’t die, nor will the significantly overwhelming majority of them have any long-term symptoms. The 1.8% which still have some lingering symptoms after 8 weeks could well be those with already compromised immune systems anyway (and/or those who are obese). There’s no indication that the symptoms of those kids who still have something after 8 weeks are anything particularly egregious either.
I couldn’t find comparable numbers for the percent of kids who catch flu that still have some symptoms after a couple of months, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the same ballpark.
