Children, despite being ineligible for vaccination before age 12, remain far safer from COVID-19 than the elderly, even when the latter group is vaccinated.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Public Health England (PHE) and local healthcare authorities across the U.S. reveal the same trend over and over: vaccinated seniors are dying at a far higher rate of COVID-19 than children.
The more encouraging half of the story is kids.
For those without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify. For children with such a condition, the danger is higher but still lower than many people believe.
— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) October 12, 2021
Since the pandemic began, 367 kids under age 12 out of approximately 48 million in the U.S. have died of COVID-19, according to the CDC. That works out to a death rate of .76 per 100,000 unvaccinated kids. Among the more than 43 million Americans aged 65 and over who are fully vaccinated, there have been 5,660 COVID-19 deaths, according to the CDC.
That equals a rate of just over 13 per 100,000, a rate far lower than among the unvaccinated; the CDC reported in September that, on an age-adjusted basis, the unvaccinated were at least 16 times more likely to die than the vaccinated. Still, compared to unvaccinated kids under 12, even fully vaccinated seniors are dying more than 17 times more frequently.
Data from England reveals the same story. PHE’s most recent COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report found four total deaths of unvaccinated individuals under age 18 over a three-week period prior to the report’s publication. During that same three-week period, 2,173 individuals aged 60 and over who were fully vaccinated died. As with the CDC data, there was a substantially higher risk of death for the unvaccinated, but the unvaccinated youth proved to be at less risk than the vaccinated elderly.
In King County, Washington, health authorities have reported a per 100,000 persons death rate of 0.0 for kids under 12 years old since January 17, 2021. For those aged 65 and older and fully vaccinated, the death rate is 0.11 per 100,000. The death rate for the unvaccinated in that age group is 1.74 per 100,000. (RELATED: Fauci Says That Halloween Is The Perfect Time Of Year To Think About Getting Vaccinated)
The Food and Drug Administration and CDC are expected to take up the question of whether or not to authorize vaccines for kids under age 12 sometime in the next month.