❦ ‘Death is not the main risk facing most children. Disability is.

Research shows the risks of harm and disability from COVID infection are serious, and risks accumulate with additional reinfections.

It isn’t surprising that COVID can cause long-term downstream problems — many other viruses do as well.

What is new is we have essentially the fastest-spreading airborne virus in recorded history, which gets into blood vessels and can damage almost every part of the body.

Despite this, it often presents acutely with only respiratory symptoms, drawing false equivocation to the common cold.

And it mutates such that everyone can get it over and over.

We fundamentally do not know the extent of the long-term damage continual reinfection with COVID will cause to children, and the data we have so far are upsetting.

What are we willing to risk?

Are we OK with more children contracting diabetes? Are we OK with many more children developing highly disabling orthostatic intolerance?

How about chronic fatigue, cognitive impairment, sleep disorders and heart problems? Are we OK with children being hospitalized for infectious diseases at far higher rates, as they have recently been? Are we fine with COVID being the No. 1 cause of infectious disease-driven death in children?

Also, what if there is a number of reinfections at which average outcomes really start to worsen?

In spite of all the evidence for caution, we are now tossing children into a world with nearly zero protections.

Without new silver-bullet scientific discoveries, young children will be pretty much guaranteed to contract new COVID variants over a dozen times by the time they reach adulthood.

Current vaccines make a dent in long COVID but do not prevent it as well as they protect against severe acute disease.

We are just hoping kids will be OK. I don’t see how they will be. The data suggest they won’t be.

The solutions for protecting kids can be gleaned from behaviours of wealthy elites, and they involve layering protections to create clean indoor air.

The recent World Economic Forum in Davos used the following safety systems: mandatory daily PCR testing with ID-badge access linked to results, new “state-of-the-art ventilation systems”, HEPA air purifiers everywhere, various levels of masking and, it appeared, virus-killing UV lighting systems.

Our children deserve these protections, in their schools and elsewhere.

These measures, along with boosters, are in fact the only currently existing ways of reducing the public health need for universal indoor masking. 

By treating children as invulnerable we are actually treating them as disposable. But they are everything – to our lives and to our future.

Their long-term health is at risk... and we need to protect them.’

❂

📖 (14 Feb 2023 ~ Calgary Herald) Treating kids as invulnerable is treating them as disposable ➤

📖 Related: (11 Jun 2019 ~ Our World In Data) Mortality in the past – around half died as children ➤

📖 Related: Guidance on Health Measures for the World Economic Forum 2023 Annual Meeting at Davos, Switzerland ➤

© 2023 Blake Murdoch / Calgary Herald.

📖 (14 Feb 2023 ~ Calgary Herald) Treating kids as invulnerable is treating them as disposable ➤

© 2023 Calgary Herald.