David Wallace-Wells: The Public Continues to Underestimate COVID’s Age Discrimination

David Wallace-Wells, New York magazine, THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH.

This article importantly highlights how, an unvaccinated 10-year-old, who may look like the very picture of COVID vulnerability heading into the school year, faces a lower mortality risk than a vaccinated 25-year-old, whom we might today regard as close to safe as can be.

Looking at UK NHS death data presented in a linear chart deaths from those under the age of 50 are more or less invisible. To scale the graph to make them visible — which would show that the risk slope from children to 50 year olds is about as dramatic as the slope from 50 year olds to 90 year olds — would require zooming in so close that the bars representing elderly outcomes would tower far above the top of your screen.

He goes on to say that “in England, the incidence of hospitalization among unvaccinated kids was lower than that of those vaccinated aged 18 to 29, and in recent weeks, the hospitalization rate among kids ages 5 to 14 has been only about one per 100,000. Over the course of the entire pandemic, which has killed more than 135,000 Brits, just one boy and seven girls between the ages of 5 and 9 have died; between the ages of 10 and 14, nine girls and five boys have died. These are all tragedies — and each means many more years of life lost than with a death among the elderly — but they are nevertheless relatively few in number. As schools reopened on the backslope of the U.K.’s Delta surge, there were about seven times as many British kids under age 5 hospitalized with the respiratory disease RSV as there were with COVID.”

For COVID-19, Age Matters As Much As Vaccination Status (nymag.com)