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Comment by ebrewste | Hacker News Reader

There are no vaccines for those under five years old. It appears it’s too much effort for everyone wear a mask until we get a vaccine for all. I used to think that this was how most people thought and behaved, but now it is confirmed clearly for me.

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Fortunately CDC data clearly shows that there is no significant risk for those under five years old. COVID-19 is less dangerous to them than other common viruses such as RSV.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/han00443.asp

"Vaccine for all" is a pretty unclear and unmotivating goal. (And I'm inclined to say it wasn't what the goalposts originally were to begin with, but I don't have links to back up my memory.) There have always been and will always be people who can't get vaccines even if they want to, ranging from everything related to medical reasons (adverse reactions, etc.) to social ones (e.g., parents won't let them get vaccines) to others. How long do you want to wait around for a miracle vaccine to come that everyone can get? At some point you have to put a threshold on the percentage of the population you're willing to leave unvaccinated before you can go back to normal. Whether it should be 70% or 90% or 99% I don't know, and any discussion on whom to "leave behind" on vaccination is bound to make people angry, but whatever it is, it can't be 100%, or you will never move on and return to normal life.

Also I (obviously) typo'd the percentages; should've been 30%, 10%, 1%, 0%.

What are the risks for kids under 5 ?

In the near term COVID isn't that likely to make them really sick but a non-negligible % of kids appear to get MIS-C or weird long-term effects like diabetes. If we can extrapolate much from adults getting the kids vaccinated will go a long way towards reducing those.

Based on CDC data the risk of an infected child getting MIS-C is about 0.02%, and the risk of dying from MIS-C is about 0.0002%.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surve...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Sure, and diabetes around 0.05%, and then the assortment of cognitive, respiratory, and cardiac symptoms that are less life threatening but more common. AAP has a reasonable overview:

https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...

There's a fair amount of uncertainty but stack it up the likely negative outcomes and I wouldn't let my unvaccinated kid catch COVID if I had a reasonable way to achieve that.

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