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Comment by oppositelock | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

>Long symptoms have also become an issue in children.

Source?

>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7#ref-CR2 >https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

“Long Covid” symptoms are unfalsifiable.

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>".

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?

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

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.

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.

> Why wouldn't you just have the vulnerable adults get vaccinated?

My comment covered breakthrough cases. Those occur among the vaccinated.

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