How has Covid-19 impacted on kids so far? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Children don’t get severe Covid-19 disease as often as older people do. That assertion underpins decisions to travel with children and otherwise exercise fewer precautions against infection in this population. Yet Covid is not benign for kids. That’s according to Aaron Milstone, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins.

Milstone: It’s hard for the average person to put Covid and their kids into context. When we think about influenza, there are on average somewhere between thirty-five and 180 pediatric deaths in the US every year from influenza. There have been many more than 180 deaths in pediatrics from Covid over the last year. so the risk of a child dying from Covid far exceeds, say 10 times higher, as an estimate, the risk that our children would have of dying from influenza.  :33

Milstone notes that variants are a wild card for kids and urges vigilance against infection for them. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.