I am fed up with the re­peat­ed state­ments com­ing out of the Min­istry of Health about keep­ing chil­dren in­side so they won’t get COVID-19 or com­ments about “Chil­dren, se­vere­ly, crit­i­cal­ly ill”.

Some in­tre­pid re­porter should ask the MoH “ex­perts” how many chil­dren are “se­vere­ly, crit­i­cal­ly ill” with COVID-19 and how many oth­ers are se­vere­ly, crit­i­cal­ly ill with oth­er dis­eases? How many chil­dren have died from COVID-19 in the pe­ri­od April 2020 to Sep­tem­ber 2021 and how many chil­dren have died from oth­er ill­ness­es?

304 chil­dren died in 2018 in T&T. This is the usu­al num­ber of chil­dren who have an­nu­al­ly died in T&T for the last 10 years or so. It used to be more when we had a high­er birth rate. Over the 44 years I’ve been in prac­tice I have nev­er heard any­one from the Min­istry of Health ex­press con­cern, pub­licly or pri­vate­ly, over those deaths. That’s be­tween 12 to 16,000 chil­dren who have died. Out of 1,536 to­tal COVID deaths since the out­break be­gan, over a year and a half, four chil­dren, two with known co­mor­bidi­ties, die and all hell breaks loose? Why? Yes the death of al­most any­one is a tragedy and more so the death of a child. But the chat­ter seems odd­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate.

All of this chat­ter is cre­at­ing and con­tribut­ing to a cli­mate of fear which in my opin­ion en­ables the gov­ern­ment to main­tain their un­rea­son­able po­si­tions about tak­ing tem­per­a­tures (use­less), about sani­tis­ing build­ings (laugh­able), about the ab­surb ef­forts to pre­vent the pop­u­la­tion from healthy ac­tiv­i­ty out­side (20 times safer than in­side) and the ridicu­lous de­ci­sion to make an in­no­cent pub­lic dri­ve around with masks be­cause the gov­ern­ment re­fus­es to deal with the PH prob­lem. In­stead of vi­able, ef­fec­tive pro­grams of vac­ci­na­tion, we waste time and en­er­gy in use­less dis­cus­sions about these un­ten­able po­si­tions or how one death in a child from COVID-19 is a tragedy while avoid­ing dis­cus­sion about those three to four hun­dred chil­dren who die each year in T&T.

Since we are not get­ting up to date sta­tis­tics on COVID or gen­er­al mor­tal­i­ty in chil­dren in T&T, I’ll try to put the risk of a child get­ting or trans­mit­ting or dy­ing from the virus in con­text by re­fer­ring to re­cent da­ta from the USA for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary through Sep­tem­ber 2021.

First of all it is clear that the risk in chil­dren has not changed with the Delta vari­ant. It is low. The delta is both more trans­mis­si­ble and more wide­spread and does make more chil­dren sick but it has not made them sick­er. It is not linked to worse dis­ease. Less than 2 per cent of chil­dren known to be in­fect­ed by the vari­ant virus are hos­pi­talised and less than 0.01 of those in­fect­ed die. The com­par­a­tive fig­ure for all adults is that 10 per­cent of adults with COVID-19 are hos­pi­talised and around 1 per­cent die. The old­er you are the worse the mor­tal­i­ty. The mor­tal­i­ty for the age group 75 to 84 is 12 per cent. It’s 25 per cent for peo­ple old­er than 85. The Eng­lish have just re­port­ed that in the first year of COVID, over-90’s had 35,000 times the risk of dy­ing of COVID-19 as young chil­dren.

That low mor­tal­i­ty for chil­dren is still a pub­lic health prob­lem. If the risk of death for chil­dren is around 0.01% and 1,000 chil­dren are in­fect­ed you would ex­pect no deaths. But if one mil­lion are in­fect­ed you would ex­pect 100 deaths.

Ac­cord­ing to some pre­lim­i­nary fig­ures that we have, up to Au­gust 6, 2021, there had been 3,497 cas­es of COVID in chil­dren in TT with the ex­pect­ed three deaths. Un­less the virus un­ex­pect­ed­ly de­vel­ops a vari­ant that is re­al­ly dead­ly for chil­dren, it will take more than a life­time for us to reach that 100 fig­ure.

What about oth­er risks? As of Au­gust 31, 2021, of 3.7 mil­lion COVID cas­es among Amer­i­can chil­dren, there had been 4,700 MIS-C cas­es with 41 deaths. Dur­ing the same pe­ri­od, I think there have been 55 cas­es in T&T with no deaths.

Long COVID is al­so a con­cern. The lat­est study from the UK found that less than 2 per cent of chil­dren with COVID ex­pe­ri­enced symp­toms for at least eight weeks and symp­tom sever­i­ty de­creased over time. We have no in­for­ma­tion on what’s hap­pen­ing in T&T.

Both of these com­pli­ca­tions are there­fore rare.

It’s wise to put all of these fig­ures in con­text. Again, since we have no lo­cal in­for­ma­tion, we look at US fig­ures.

In the USA, be­tween Jan­u­ary and Sep­tem­ber 2021, of an un­der-18 pop­u­la­tion of 73 mil­lion, 280 chil­dren died from COVID-19. Flu and pneu­mo­nia, heart dis­ease, drown­ing, guns and mo­tor ve­hi­cles were all dead­lier to chil­dren dur­ing the same time pe­ri­od. Flu and pneu­mo­nia killed over 300 chil­dren. Heart dis­ease, over 500. 750 chil­dren died from drown­ing. Over 1,200 from firearms and a whop­ping 1600 from mo­tor ve­hi­cle ac­ci­dents.

Most chil­dren in T&T and else­where in the world, are safe from COVID. It’s the oth­er things, the tra­di­tion­al things that few even both­er to think about, that are killing and mu­ti­lat­ing our chil­dren’s bod­ies and minds.