Thank you for doing this! This is extremely valuable in terms of assessing risk. One question/point: The risk of death in the article is per COVID-19 infection, but the risk of hospitalization is per 100,000 population. I don't think these things are comparable in assessing risk. It might be more useful to pull data on hospitalizatio…
Thank you for doing this! This is extremely valuable in terms of assessing risk. One question/point: The risk of death in the article is per COVID-19 infection, but the risk of hospitalization is per 100,000 population. I don't think these things are comparable in assessing risk. It might be more useful to pull data on hospitalization per COVID-19 infection, as you did with the data on death per COVID-19 infection. Here is one source for under 5 COVID-19 infected hospitalization data:
I've seen other, pre-Omicron data from UK NHS (sorry no easy link) that agrees with the study above in terms of hospitalization per case of children under 5 with a COVID-19 infection.
The other issue I see is equating COVID-19 pediatric hospitalization per population, in a time with serious safety mitigations (masking, social distancing, distance learning), to pediatric RSV and flu hospitalization from 2003-10 with no mitigations in place. I'm not sure we have pediatric hospitalization data for flu and RSV over the last two years, so it's tough to compare these directly.
However, we have some data on RSV and flu activity over the last two years. This chart shows that flu and RSV activity dropped to almost nothing during the COVID where we know the COVID hospitalization rate (at least per population, and possibly per infection):
Another very imperfect way to compare flu vs COVID-19, considering COVID-era safety mitigations, is to compare mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitalization isn't death, and the flu hospitalization rate might be similar to COVID-19 even if mortality rates are far lower. That being said, in comparing the last few years, with safety mitigations in place, pediatric flu deaths dropped to single digits. CDC reports seven pediatric flu deaths over the last two years.
Total pediatric COVID-19 deaths during the same period, with the same mitigations, are at least 990 (and I believe there is a time lag in this data, meaning the count is low):
So again, I think equating RSV and flu without safety mitigations to COVID-19 with mitigations is problematic. That being said, the RSV numbers are so much worse that it seems reasonable to believe RSV may be equal to or worse than COVID in terms of hospitalization.
Again, I very much appreciate the perspective and I think the risk data is extremely helpful for people to read.
Thank you for doing this! This is extremely valuable in terms of assessing risk. One question/point: The risk of death in the article is per COVID-19 infection, but the risk of hospitalization is per 100,000 population. I don't think these things are comparable in assessing risk. It might be more useful to pull data on hospitalization per COVID-19 infection, as you did with the data on death per COVID-19 infection. Here is one source for under 5 COVID-19 infected hospitalization data:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.12.22269179v1
I've seen other, pre-Omicron data from UK NHS (sorry no easy link) that agrees with the study above in terms of hospitalization per case of children under 5 with a COVID-19 infection.
The other issue I see is equating COVID-19 pediatric hospitalization per population, in a time with serious safety mitigations (masking, social distancing, distance learning), to pediatric RSV and flu hospitalization from 2003-10 with no mitigations in place. I'm not sure we have pediatric hospitalization data for flu and RSV over the last two years, so it's tough to compare these directly.
However, we have some data on RSV and flu activity over the last two years. This chart shows that flu and RSV activity dropped to almost nothing during the COVID where we know the COVID hospitalization rate (at least per population, and possibly per infection):
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7029a1.htm#F2_down
Another very imperfect way to compare flu vs COVID-19, considering COVID-era safety mitigations, is to compare mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitalization isn't death, and the flu hospitalization rate might be similar to COVID-19 even if mortality rates are far lower. That being said, in comparing the last few years, with safety mitigations in place, pediatric flu deaths dropped to single digits. CDC reports seven pediatric flu deaths over the last two years.
https://gis.cdc.gov/GRASP/Fluview/PedFluDeath.html
Total pediatric COVID-19 deaths during the same period, with the same mitigations, are at least 990 (and I believe there is a time lag in this data, meaning the count is low):
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-on-Ages-0-18-Yea/nr4s-juj3
So again, I think equating RSV and flu without safety mitigations to COVID-19 with mitigations is problematic. That being said, the RSV numbers are so much worse that it seems reasonable to believe RSV may be equal to or worse than COVID in terms of hospitalization.
Again, I very much appreciate the perspective and I think the risk data is extremely helpful for people to read.