In a recent viral tweet, the new German Health Minister, Professor Karl Lauterbach, shared what seems like an alarming graph:
It shows daily Covid hospital admissions in England for all children (i.e., those aged under 18) since the start of the pandemic. Lauterbach wrote:
The UK data shows alarming levels in children. Since Omicron can be warded off well by masks, mask requirements in school and regular testing are absolutely necessary.
Incidentally, the graph itself was produced by Independent SAGE – the group that’s like SAGE, only more pessimistic about Covid and more in favour of restrictions (and not an official Government advisory body).
So, what should we make of Lauterbach’s tweet? One of the stylised facts of the pandemic is that Covid poses almost no risk to children. Has this ceased to be true in the era of Omicron? No, fortunately it has not.
One reason that Covid hospital admissions for children shot up in late December is simple: infections shot up at around the same time (in the first week of January, more than 6% of the population tested positive). And when more people in the general population are infected, the number of people admitted to hospital with Covid will rise.
Under simple assumptions, if the percentage of the population that’s infected jumps from 1% to 6%, then so should the fraction of people admitted to hospital with Covid.
Another possible reason Covid hospital admissions for children shot up – suggested by Professor Russell Viner of UCL – is that Omicron has a greater impact in the upper airways, which are smaller in young children. And as others have noted, this feature also makes Omicron less deadly.
Yet another reason, notes the FT, is the introduction of treatment guidelines requiring babies who develop fever to be put under hospital observation.
Indeed, a new study from the U.S. confirms that Omicron is less deadly than Delta – even in young children. Lindsey Wang and colleagues compared two cohorts of under 5s: those who caught Covid for the first time during the Delta wave, and those who caught it for the first time during the Omicron wave.
The two cohorts were matched on a large number of relevant variables including age, sex, race and pre-existing health conditions. Results are shown below:
For all four outcome variables considered, the risk was significantly lower among those who caught Omicron. To take one example, only 0.14% of the Omicron cohort were admitted to the ICU, compared to 0.43% of the Delta cohort.
What’s more, as this graph from the FT shows, the recent uptick in paediatric hospital admissions for Covid isn’t large relative to seasonal peaks for other child respiratory viruses:
Returning to the German Health Minister’s tweet, the totality of evidence does not suggest that “mask requirements in school and regular testing are absolutely necessary”. In fact, I’d describe them as ‘absolutely unnecessary’.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Sadiq the LTN – Little Terrible Nuisance
Can’t scrap the lot though, can he? That would upset his C40 minders.
Lousy…
Restricting traffic in one area increases it in surrounding areas – only a conspiracy theorist would have predicted that. It’s almost as if the people using the roads all have very good reasons for doing so and are determined to make their journeys.
They should call it an STN…a slow traffic neighbourhood.
Since they like attributing individual deaths to motor vehicle pollution which people died because of these jams?
CORRECTION:
The only individual death ‘attributed to air pollution‘ in the entire world was based on unchallenged expert evidence: “Key witnesses to the Inquest, including Dr Claire Holman and Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, had expressed the need for setting health-based targets for air pollution reduction.”
With unchallenged expert evidence the Coroner has no choice but to accept it.
And the death was not “caused by” air pollution.
According to the Coroner, the death was caused by asthma. The child had extreme asthma.
So had the NHS investigated the causes of the child’s extreme asthma she and her family should have been rehoused away from the South Circular road in London:
“Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.” “Ella’s mother “was not given information about the health risks of air pollution and its potential to exacerbate asthma”. The lack of information also possibly contributed to her death.”
So had the NHS investigated the causes of the child’s extreme asthma she and her family should have been rehoused away from the South Circular road in London.
And this does not seem to be correct: “Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.”
A more accurate statement is “Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to air pollution which was excessive for someone with her particular extreme asthma.”
So when you read the ridiculous numbers of alleged air pollution deaths all based on ‘estimates’ none of them are real air pollution deaths but estimates based on the usual ‘modelling’ and epidemiology which we are all now so used to knowing we cannot trust.
The fact this is the only death worldwide attributed to air pollution should ring the alarm bells about citing this as evidence air pollution all by itself kills people.
It certainly used to when the main form of heating in london was open fires in people’s homes and the famous London ‘pea-souper’ fogs were part of daily life. But then we got legislation to clean everything up with smokeless fuels later followed by natural gas central heating.
Plus cars have catalytic converters to reduce emissions.
It has all gotten a lot better since the 1950s and earlier.
When I was young all the buildings in london were dark grey because they were covered in soot.
London now is unrecognisable. Take a look at some of the old movies on TV and check out the colour of the buildings compared to now.
One step back for the little tyrants. But they will now be planning how to turn it into a NTN …. no traffic neighbourhood.
Soon to be a “no-people-neighbourhood”.