"Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital."
That stood out to me as well. I think it meant to say: 2% of children who were diagnosed with the multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) died from it.
Here's the full quote: "We now see this multi-system, inflammatory condition can be fatal for kids, who average 8 years old. Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital. We see it in some adults. It’s debilitating, not requiring hospitalization, but they have difficulty breathing and joint aches—which are really telling—chest pain, and other symptoms that affect brain function."
It looks like a typo. It should say "Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with MIS-C in the United States have died from it"
Edit: I just realized the first comment in the article has exactly the same suggestion
Good catch. The next question is what percentage of kids contract MIS-C as a result of COVID? Based on the <18 death toll reported so far, it seems like it must be a small percentage.
Edit: Answering my own question with a quick reading of [1]. 186 patients identified total, if I'm reading correctly. This is a tiny number. 2% of that would be 4 kids.
Thanks, the first study I linked had only looked at 26 states. This is still a very small number considering the total number of likely cases of COVID in the <18 demographic.
Definitely.
In Allegheny county (Pittsburgh), out of the 214 diagnosed cases in the 0-9 age group, there were a total of 4 hospitalizations (1.87%), 0 ICU (0%) and 0 deaths (0%).
It’s been corrected...
“Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, who have developed multi-system, inflammatory condition, have died from it...”
These kind of highly communicable respiratory pandemics only get reclassified. What we call "flu season", for example, is just the continuing spread of past flu pandemics. Most health officials expect that this will be the long term trajectory for the coronavirus, even with vaccines and herd immunity.
From a little link in the right sidebar, it appears this article is part of Nautilus issue #88, titled "Love & Sex": http://nautil.us/issue/88/love--sex
The other thing that stood out to me is this "The incidence of it is anywhere from 10 to 80 percent, even in young people who recover from a mild attack of COVID-19" about "Long COVID".
In the medium-term the most promising thing out there is better, faster, easier testing. There are a number of organisations developing saliva-based tests that can return results in around an hour for a few dollars a test. Being able to test everyone on a regular basis may well be enough to keep the disease under control without major impact on our lives.
There are significant resources going into scaling up new testing technologies, but it's definitely not getting the support that vaccine development is, and maybe it should.
>We now see this multi-system, inflammatory condition can be fatal for kids, who average 8 years old. Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital.
Is this a typo? Possibly he meant 0.2%?
The data from my county (Alameda) has 1,450 cases <18 and 0 deaths: https://covid-19.acgov.org/data.page
Similarly, data from South Korea, Spain, and Italy, and China is <= 0.2%: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatalit...