Xan wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 10:17 pm
If they do get infected (which is a matter of time) they're at much greater risk than they are from the vaccine.
Just a reminder that you have to be very careful about not only the numerator but also the denominator when you cite numbers to support a given position. There is a logical flaw in the quoted sentence: when people mean "infection" they mean either 'positive test" or "clinical case of COVID." What you actually care about in this scenario is exposure to the COVID virus, which is an order of magnitude more prevalent than an established COVID infection - ESPECIALLY in kids who as a group are well known to be highly resistant to COVID. The science behind this is that they are too young to have expressed ACE2 receptors in their lung tissue.
There's limited data on the difference between COVID exposure (which is something that will happen to all of us, if it hasn't happened already) and clinical infection. The only 3 pieces of info I'm aware of:
1. Ship outbreaks. It's a sure bet that all the passengers & crew of the Diamond Princess were exposed to the virus, but only 20% of them got sick. And this was with a passenger population that was almost exclusively over 65, as is typical for people taking cruises. So that's a 5:1 ratio of exposure to clinical infection in a highly vulnerable population. You can probably make similar estimates from early nursing home outbreaks, where I believe the proportion of sick residents was similar.
2. Random antibody testing in New York State & City: In NYC, 20% of people sampled (randomly selected by testers hanging around shopping centers) turned up positive for antibodies. This was in May 2020, when much less than 1% of the city's population had clinical/diagnosed COVID. That's a 20:1 ratio among (mostly) healthy adults.
3. Random antibody testing in Santa Clara County, CA: Similar study that concluded the ratio of exposed/positive antibodies to clinical infections was closer to 50:1. I'm not sure if children were included, but I would assume the population would be biased toward healthy Caucasians compared to the New York City study due to the large proportion of minorities in NYC.
The question has not been further studied that I'm aware of....if anyone else knows of a study please do chime in. There's no data on children except the early evidence from China, but at a guess, a ratio of 40-50:1 for exposure to clinical COVID is probably in the ballpark.