Is chickenpox as dangerous to children as coronavirus?

[BovvyDazz]

So I can’t decide whether to send my son back to nursery in June. I keep changing my mind. So I’m not evangelical one way or the other.

Been looking at some stats tonight. I’ll quote my sources as it’s Mumsnet:

There have been 12 deaths of under 19s of coronavirus; 3 of which with no underlying conditions in England.

How many cases, I don’t know as we didn’t test the majority of cases up till this week. +100,000 anyway.

www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/COVID-19-total-announced-deaths-14-May-2020-2.xlsx

Risk of chickenpox; approx 4 children die each year; with an approx case fatality rate of 2 out of 100,000 (slightly higher for under 4s; lower for over 5s).

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC59681/#!po=2.08333

So whilst there is a lot of unknowns (risk of the inflammatory condition of which one child has died to date in U.K. of), long term effects, and slightly higher risk to parents; for me it appears it’s not vastly greater than the risk of chickenpox, and must be less than the risk of child seriously hurt in a traffic accident in any given time period.

Lougle I take your point; it’s not comparing car journey in the day; but let’s say, for children with no underlying conditions, there has been at least 100,000 cases (3 deaths). Let’s add the death for Kawaski in case it’s not included in these stats. Therefore that’s at max a 1:25,000 fatality stat... so you could reasonable say
‘There is more chance of a child being killed in a car accident in a given year than dying of coronavirus’.

I don’t want to take my son, because he won’t adhere to social distancing rules and I believe it will scare him to much. There is many changes he is bound to forget something and get told off. I prefer to send him when things are calmer and other children can remind him of the rules or the teacher learn the best way to make the children learn. If a teacher is scared then it is harder for said teacher to teach my child. That is something I believe. So why not wait until things calm down a bit more.

They have found the griund glass opacities in the lungs of even asymptomatic children though. So it is not without potential consequences. They can have pneumonia without symptoms.

I agree i want the nos hospitalised each week by age group and cumulative.

1% of age 20-29 are hospitalised so while you can argue about teachers dying or not the fact is even you g ones will end up in hospital.

Just to put some context round this. In Scotland since 1st jan 58 under 1's have died and 31 1 to 14 year olds. None of these were covid related. I'm sure England Wales stats are on the ONS website.

@Sunshinegirl82 I misread.

@BovvyDazz but we've only had 3 months of Coronavirus deaths, so if you want to make it a year chance, then it would be 1:6250, not 1:25000

Actually, that's not true either, because we don't know how many cases there will be in a year.

It’s not time frame though, it’s number of cases. The number of deaths per number of cases is what gives you a meaningful level of risk.

And health isn't defined by 'alive or dead'

There's a huge range in the middle. Yes, death is the ultimate bad result of Covid-19 but what about how many cases result in serious ill health and hospital treatment.

We obviously cannot know what the long term affects are, there has been recent news about the Kawasaki illnesses which start 6-8 weeks after infection, there's been concern about kidney damage and lung damage which may or may not heal.

Thought to be 0.2% mortality rate for Covid19 in children.
Chicken pox mortality is around 0.5 per million so 0.00005%

Covid19 has the higher paediatric mortality.
Neither is high but chicken pox deaths are entirely negligible. There remains a lack of clarity about Covid19 related deaths similar to Kawasaki’s or renal failure.

I haven’t seen a risk factor as high as 0.2% for children anywhere. I’d suggest it is significantly lower than that.

medium.com/wintoncentre/what-are-the-risks-of-covid-and-what-is-meant-by-the-risks-of-covid-c828695aea69