IF THERE has been one saving grace of the covid-19 pandemic, it is that children are relatively safe from serious disease and death compared with adults.
Over the first year of the pandemic, only 259 under-18s in England were admitted to intensive care with covid-19. Another 312 were treated for a serious but rare condition that developed after infection called delayed inflammatory syndrome.
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As the UK government prepares to lift nearly all covid-19 restrictions in England on 19 July and allow the virus to spread through the community (see Covid-19 deaths in England could peak at 100 per day in August), it might seem as if children aren鈥檛 at risk, but this isn鈥檛 the case.
Under-18s make up a fifth of the UK population and very few have been vaccinated, because unlike countries such as the US, which is offering covid-19 vaccines to children who are 12 and over, the UK has decided to hold off (see Is it time for the UK to vaccinate children against covid-19?). Cases of covid-19 in the UK are growing fast, and with more than half of the adult population vaccinated, the spread of the virus will be driven into younger people, especially unvaccinated children.
Effectively, the government is pursuing a 鈥渘atural herd immunity鈥� strategy, in which children are exposed to the virus until nearly all of them develop immunity.
鈥淯nlike the US, the UK is holding off on vaccinating children against covid-19鈥�
If children are at low risk of dying, does this matter? Well, when very large numbers of people are exposed to the virus, many will get ill and some will die. In the case of children, those at highest risk are those with underlying medical conditions. In the first year of the pandemic, 25 children died in the UK from either acute covid-19 or the delayed inflammatory syndrome, and that was while restrictions were in place.
In addition, some 13 per cent of infected children develop persistent and sometimes debilitating symptoms. Letting the virus rip through a pool of unvaccinated people also increases the risk of a new variant emerging that can evade the protection from the vaccines we have. We have argued many times in the pages of this magazine against taking this kind of herd immunity approach to the pandemic. The same logic applies to children.