Rita Panahi: Media doomsayers to blame for kid Covid hysteria

Let’s get some perspective on the Deltra strain in children — healthy kids are not getting very sick.

There is no rush for healthy children to be vaccinated, according to experts. Picture: Adalberto Roque

Three truths have emerged in recent weeks.

One, Australia is no longer seen as the Lucky Country around the world, with our totalitarian Covid response increasingly derided from London to Las Vegas.

The mockery has intensified with news clips of Australia regularly going viral; it’s clear that what has been normalised here is seen as a dystopian nightmare by many in the advanced world.

Shock has turned to mockery with satirical news site The Babylon Bee publishing an article with the headline: Australian Citizens Ask Taliban To Liberate Their Country.

Two, locking down hard and early does not guarantee a shorter lockdown when the more infectious Delta strain is at work.

Victoria’s Lockdown 6 was supposed to last seven days but has already been extended twice and is almost guaranteed to be extended again. And again. It’s entirely possible that Sydney will have restrictions lifted before Melbourne.

Three, after 18 months of saturation coverage a significant number of people remain frightfully ignorant of the most basic facts about an issue that has dominated our lives. For that the clickbait, doomsayer media bears a great deal of the blame.

There are plenty of experts trying to counter the hysteria, particularly about Delta and kids, but too many in the media prefer alarmist rhetoric. It’s why Bill Bowtell, who does not have any accredited medical qualifications, is continuously promoted as a ‘leading public health expert’ on the ABC, Channel 10’s The Project, Channel 7 and other media outlets.

If you’ve listened to talkback or read comments on social media in the past month it is evident that a disturbing number of people are convinced that the Delta strain is going to kill or seriously damage scores of healthy Australian children.

This week I spoke to a number of medical experts, including possibly the most well-credentialed person when it comes to kids and Covid-19, Professor Robert Booy (an infectious diseases expert and Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Sydney), about the danger the Delta stain poses to children.

“It is much more infectious but in children we are not seeing a lot of serious disease,” he said.

“I can understand why parents are concerned, but let’s get perspective, in children it’s usually a cold or no symptoms at all. Healthy kids are not getting very sick.”

But Prof Booy warns that if children have serious underlying medical conditions like cerebral palsy, Down syndrome or heart and lung problems then the impact of the virus can be severe and in very rare cases even deadly.

That has been the experience overseas, in the UK the most comprehensive study undertaken into the effects of Covid-19 on children concluded that the risk of serious illness or death is extremely low, lower than influenza, with a survival rate of 99.995 per cent.

Indeed almost all of the 25 deaths in the under 18 age group were patients with chronic underlying health issues, including life-limiting conditions and complex neurodisabilities.

That study released last month, led by researchers at University College London, Imperial College London and the universities of Bristol, York and Liverpool, was looking at data up until March 2021 when Delta took hold.

Prof Booy has analysed both local data and research from overseas and has spoken to a number of infectious disease paediatricians in the UK.

“They’re not seeing a surge, they’ve had Delta in the UK for six months, they are not seeing a surge in intensive care admissions or a surge in deaths,” he said.

“Up until March this year they only had 25 deaths in children and over 100,000 deaths in adults and since then, over the last six months when Delta has been prominent they have not seen an increase, indeed the intensive care admissions in London are less now for children than they were when Alpha was a problem in December and January.”

Another piece of good news is that “long Covid” is far less prevalent in children than adults. “Long Covid is simply something that lasts at least three months after you’ve got Covid, it usually presents as fatigue or brain fog,” Prof Booy said.

“In adults, between 5 and 15 per cent of people who get Covid will get long Covid with symptoms lasting at least three months. In children they’ve (former paediatric colleagues) just published a report in the UK that the figure is 1.7 per cent.

“In children it’s more likely to occur in teenagers than children under 10 ... long Covid isn’t as much of an issue for children as it is for adults.”

Prof Booy recommends that children 12 and above who have serious medical conditions be prioritised for vaccination, but there’s no rush for healthy children.

IN SHORT

As early as next week kids aged 12 and above will have access to Pfizer jabs but children should not be included in the vaccination targets Australia must reach for the country to re-open and our freedoms to be restored.

Read the full opinion article here.