“I’ve been a huge advocate of keeping schools fully open to in person education since October of 2020,” Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, tweeted final week. “Still am.” So why is Dr. Jha engaged in scare-mongering concerning the hazard of Covid to kids?
In a May 30 tweet, Dr. Jha asserted that Covid is “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.” He linked to an article by Harvard Medical School teacher
Jeremy Faust,
which claims that Covid killed greater than 600 kids in 2021, whereas the flu kills “an average” of solely 120 kids yearly. But Dr. Faust’s knowledge are severely skewed, for 3 causes.
First, whereas flu is seldom examined, everybody admitted to a hospital for any cause will get a Covid take a look at. Between October 2018 and September 2019, 1.4 million flu assessments have been reported to public-health and scientific labs. As of May 31, 2022, there had been 897 million PCR assessments for Covid.
Second, proof from audits of loss of life certificates discovered that 35% of all pediatric deaths in 2020 “had co-occurring diagnosis codes that could not be plausibly categorized as either a chain-of-event or significant contributing condition,” in accordance with a research revealed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Put one other manner, in at the very least 35% of pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the trigger.
Third, Dr. Faust depends on a determine for confirmed flu deaths that’s well-known to underestimate precise flu deaths by an order of magnitude. Correcting for the dearth of flu testing, the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases estimated 1,161 pediatric flu deaths within the 2012-13 season relatively than the 142 that Dr. Faust reported.
For the White House to amplify a false message of excessive Covid threat for kids undermines public well being and erodes public confidence. It foments an inaccurate evaluation of threat and is the type of misinformation that results in extra college closings in addition to burdensome masks and quarantine mandates.
There are far better dangers to kids than Covid. Since March 2020, greater than 1,000 children have died with Covid (a median of round 38 a month), in accordance with the CDC. In the identical interval greater than 1,400 kids died from drug- and alcohol-related causes.
The largest threat to kids comes from disruptions of their education. We will likely be cleansing up the school-closing mess for years, and fomenting baseless concern solely makes the duty more durable.
Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of well being coverage at Stanford and a founding fellow on the Academy for Science and Freedom.
Correction
An earlier model misstated the estimate for 2012-13 flu deaths.
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Appeared within the June 6, 2022, print version.
Source: www.wsj.com”