Normal NOW
It’s time. With 74% of Massachusetts residents—of all ages—having received at least 1 shot, there is nothing more to wait for. The only group without access to vaccines are children, and their risk of severe outcomes from COVID is so low as to be “difficult to quantify,” (the CDC estimates their risk at around 1/100,000 ~ 3-4x lower than flu, and far lower than their risk of suicide, drowning or dying in a car accident). When it comes to that other bogeyman—long COVID--study after study, shows that the risk appears to be no higher for kids who have contracted COVID than those who never had COVID at all (i.e., most of the time it’s “long-pandemic”). The time is now.
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We have 3 effective vaccines widely available to all who want them, as well as multiple therapeutics, to aid treatment. There is no miracle cure we still need to wait for.
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COVID is now endemic. We will all be exposed to it multiple times throughout our lifetimes, building natural immune responses, in addition to our vaccine-mediated ones.
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We do not need to wait for vaccines to be available to children to return to normal. COVID poses a significantly lower risk (0.001% IFR, according to CDC estimates) to children than flu (0.003% - 0.004%). Further, Pfizer’s clinical trials did not demonstrate any medical benefit from vaccines for children (cases, disease, hospitalization or death). Indeed, the trial was far too small to quantify such a benefit—to quantify the improvement in risk of death, they would have needed to enroll more than 200K children—they enrolled just over 2000.
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There are currently (10/12/21) just 4 pediatric hospitalizations for COVID in Massachusetts—among 1.5 million kids. During the winter peak, there were 20.