Parents naturally care deeply about the safety of their children, especially their most vulnerable ones. This is both involuntary and laudatory.
But concerned parents often fail at risk analysis. We tend to fear the statistically negligible possibility that our children will be abducted by a stranger if we let them play unsupervised. We tend to think the odds of death or serious injury from a jungle gym or climbing a tree is worse than it is.
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And in this pandemic, parents of small children tend to think that odds of serious illness from COVID-19 infection is far higher than it is. What’s worse, policymakers, schools, airlines, and day care institutions treat babies and toddlers as a far greater threat to spread COVID-19 than these children actually are.
I’ve seen journalists and other very educated people on Twitter and Facebook worrying about passing contact between a stranger and “my unvaccinated baby.” A Twitter search reveals tons of anxiety about “my unvaccinated baby” and “until my toddler can get vaccinated.”
A Washington Post column today suggested that getting vaccine antibodies to babies is adding to the already crippling pressure new mothers face to make breastfeeding work. The Associated Press, USA Today, and a dozen other outlets ran statistically inadequate stories trying to scare people about “kids too young to get vaccinated” now being hospitalized with COVID-19 in record numbers.
Slate published a piece about the delay in the approval of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and all the anxiety this gives parents of young children.
“I want to scream. If I can scream, for a second? The pandemic is not f***ing over, because children under 5 cannot get f***ing vaccinated,” the writer wrote. “Do not tell me it’s usually really mild for kids. I know it’s usually really mild for kids. Do not tell me about your neighbor’s toddler who didn’t even have a sniffle.”
The Slate piece in the end rests on the fear of a 10-day quarantine, but nobody is calling for a 10-day quarantine. If your 2-year-old gets COVID-19, and if you even notice, he or she will be symptom-free in two days at most, and the isolation is five days from the first symptom. It’s basically a long weekend. It’s not fun, but it’s less harmful than all this anxiety.
Tons of parents, even before the omicron and delta variants, have been keeping their little children away from play dates, birthday parties, or other fun things out of the mistaken belief that no unvaccinated person is safe.
The fact is very young children who get COVID-19 are almost all totally fine, and the parents who freak about it are not doing proper risk analysis.
One reason Pfizer and Moderna may have had trouble with their COVID-19 vaccine trials for the under-5 crowd is that the under-5 crowd already has such robust immunity that the vaccines might not have much of an effect on the children’s immune systems. A drug with a negligible effect is not going to get approved.
How safe are young children? A grand total of 2,203 children under 5 have been hospitalized with COVID-19 in the course of the pandemic. That number, according to hospital officials, is mostly children hospitalized for something else who incidentally test positive for COVID-19. Some of those are children who tested positive and then a week later broke an arm.
If those hospital officials are correct about “most” pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations being caused by something else, then the coronavirus has sent less than 1,100 children under 5 to the hospital. That’s out of about 2 million children under the age of 5. That’s less than 1 in 1,000, and it’s probably far, far less considering the expansive definition of “COVID hospitalizations.”
Your unvaccinated baby is far safer from serious COVID-19 than you are, even with your three shots.
