Risks to children are vanishingly small? Really?

[GrumpiestOldWoman]

Heard a statistician on BBC this morning explaining the statistics, tiny tiny risk to the under 25's.

Yes, fine, children have negligible risk of dying from covid 19. But I view the risk to my children as including the risk of losing one or both parents, which for many of us is more likely. Look how close the Prime Minister's son came to losing a parent.

Risk of dying - tiny. Risk from losing parent (s) - more significant surely?

Harms from lockdown are much greater than the risks of coronavirus to children.

We are asking children to suffer to protect adults, particularly older adults.

Is that ethical?

Waxonwaxoff0 the seatbelt isn't a perfect analogy as it reduces risk to you. Think of it as "I will drink and drive a bit and I accept that I am risking my kids and other people's kids, but that is my decision to make"

I don't want everyone terrified all the time. I have not lost any sleep over this. I would like people to be concerned enough not to make matters worse.

I am far more worried about the impact on my daughter’s mental health from months of no interaction with other kids than I am about her getting the virus. No one seems to give a toss about the effect of lockdown on children. See this thread for lots of distressing examples: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/3903511-My-child-has-lost-it

@bookworm14 completely agree

My child is already in school because of the risk to his mental health of constant high anxiety and the self injurious and 'violent' behaviour was greater than the risk of the virus. Risks have to be balanced.

Right well shall we also consider the risk of growing up during a depression? Or the risk of children struggling socially due to lockdown? What other secondary risks need to be included in ‘risk’ which all normal people know means ‘risk to life’ in this context.

I understand the desire to understand the long term impacts. Obviously it would be great to understand that but realistically by their very nature (being long term) we are unlikely to have the information for quite a long time. Certainly months, probably years.

We cannot realistically avoid the risk of COVID entirely until such time as that information becomes available so I’m not sure where that actually gets us to.

It would be nice to know a lot of things but we have to work with the situation as it is and not what we might like it to be.

I would wager at the end of this, there will be more excess child deaths from the effects of lockdown (suicide later due to mental health impacts, exposure to DV, murdered in DV situations where school would have picked this up and child removed, widening of inequality, etc), than excess child deaths due to COVID.

Chicken pox, cars, trampolines, and lockdown, these are all risks to children likely to be much higher than COVID. Allowing lockdown to continue for young children is negligent, in my opinion, and I don't understand why people are throwing kids health and wellbeing under a bus for the sake of the adults. That's not something our society usually does.

@LastTrainEast I don't think the drinking and driving analogy is great either because no one is going to suffer by not drinking and driving. But children are going to suffer if their education, social skills and mental health are disrupted. At some point it's going to be a choice between my own child's welfare and the welfare of strangers that I don't know. And as is human nature, I'll be choosing my own child every time.

Suchanaughtydog Firstly for this short a period of time that is just rubbish and secondly kids will be damaged when their parents die.

If 31,000 adults have died surely that means 1000s of children have lost parents. Do we tell them how lucky they are that they can play outside now?

Of course it's nonsense OP.

Because then you'd have to include any potential consequences of COVID in a definition of risk which doesn't reflect the physical risk of the actual infection.

And you'd have to do it for everyone.

Take me. Early 40s, no known underlying conditions. Risk of death from COVID. Low.

Risk of me losing a parent. Moderate.
Risk of me losing my job. High.
Risk of me losing my home. High.
Risk of further deteriorating MH. V.high.

In no way does that reflect my actual risk of dying or being seriously ill from being infected by COVID.

Words have meaning. Especially when it comes to illness/death.

Children have already been murdered in lockdown. A short time for adults, is forever for a child in an abusive situation that isn't detected due to lockdown.

@nellodee what a stupid thing to say. Only 15 died because they WERE wearing seatbelts. Had they not been, the death toll would be much higher.

@DominaShantotto I am becoming increasingly concerned about the mental health of my own children, my friends’ children and the teenage children that I teach. An entire generation are suffering and we have no idea what the long-term impact will be.

I'm being facetious with the seatbelt, obviously. But I see so many posts where people say "I'm much more worried about my child dying in a car crash" when actually, the risk of that is pretty low, and the amounts of children we have had getting sick currently has been over only a couple of months, with lockdown. So in proportion, Covid IS a bigger risk than traffic accidents, even though both numbers are fairly small. I'm all for reducing risks as far as is reasonably possible and kept my children rear facing as long as I could and had them in high backed seats when they could have moved to boosters. I really don't believe in not using seat belts. I also don't want to put children at risk of long term lung damage, infertility, heart disease, etc if there are other alternatives.

I agree the risk to a family is
Mum risk + dad + child (+ Gp)
A parent isnt only the emotional though if they die = poverty as how can the other? Parent afford rent etc and bills and childcare...
Even the nhs 60k is tiny compared to how much dp earns in the years to retirement.

Also you need to x the deaths by 12+ to get how many die before immunity. So 3k under 45 becomes 36k etc. Which is a blood lot of workers and parents and a few teenagers. And that is supposing you dont happen to exceed the nhs ability to treat which them = certain death for those 20%...

Also wondering what risk they face and at what level they would be concerned at.
5%
10%

The risk to younger people is significant- the world would not be shutting down for the over 70 as they can stay home.
The gov had been told the predicted deaths could be 100k by the end of the year.
The nhs should be there to protect us not just itself. (as should our gov)

What are the other alternatives that you’re referring to?

Less than one percent of COVID deaths in the uk have been under 40. Therefore there will not be thousands of young children who have lost a parent to it. Clearly we don’t want anyone to die from it, and even one death is too many, but the fact remains that the risk to children, either of getting the virus badly or of losing a parent, is extremely small.

But mainly i think countries are trying so hard to keep it out because of the long term consequences. Who wants those 17.5% to have long term (heart) and lung issues??

Keep cases low, don't go for herd immunity, don't give up and say "everyone's going to get it at some point", concentrate on lowering cases, get the app, back test and track, get on top of this in the next 2 months.

As opposed to... open up as much as possible, alternate between lockdown and release, lockdown and release, never quite getting cases low enough for tracing to be effective.

Does easing lockdown for young children increase the risk to their related adults? Or, are we punishing children for a negligible reduction in risk to the population? I suspect the latter. Didn't they say that closing schools had a tiny effect on the model, whereas social distancing and hand washing had a major effect?

Children are losing out because adults don't want to wash their hands, and stop celebrating VE day.

I thought we'd stopped child sacrifice.

The risk of me or dp dying is very small. The risk of Ds dying is even smaller.

The risk of one of us losing our job and ds's quality of life taking a swift decline is huge.

The risk of my mental health taking a swift decline is also huge.

We don't know the long term issues that Corona might bring but equally we don't know the long term mental health issues our children might suffer because of this.

Especially those that have been taught outside is dangerous. Other people are dangerous. etc.

I'm not under 40. I have young children. The median age of first time mothers was 28.8. That means a lot of 40 year old mothers will have an oldest child of 11.2. Plus other children. But let's not consider them in our figures, eh?

Median age of fatherhood at first child is 33.4

We know 6 weeks summer holiday impacts on children’s progress. Hence why we have debates a about changing it and some schools start the work before the summer now. They will have had 9 weeks off at best and will be lucky if all are back or full time before another 6 weeks for summer (in England and Wales), that’s a long time and it will impact.

If 31,000 adults have died surely that means 1000s of children have lost parents. Do we tell them how lucky they are that they can play outside now?

Considering the vast vast majority of those were over 70 even over 80 it's more likely the children were in their 50s themselves. The risk to our children of losing their parents is still low.