This week they published a piece on the benefits to infants from maternal vaccination, reported in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 22nd. In the introduction, the study authors make the following claim: “Infants younger than 6 months of age are at high risk for complications of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19)”
This came as a surprise, so I checked the source they quote in support of this statement. In short, the source tells us nothing about risk of hospitalization. All it tells us is the number of hospitalized infants over time per 100,000 in the population, which shows that early January this year, during a surge of Omicron infections, there was of course also a surge in hospitalizations; if we look at the general trends we see this in all age-groups.
This has nothing to do with hospitalization risk at all.
“… [H]igh risk for complications …”? In the general population, the probability of hospitalization following a Covid infection according to the CDC in October 2021 was around 5%; this means one in every 20 people infected was admitted to hospital.
After Omicron took over, this number went down by 50-70%, to between 1.5-2.5%. And if we look at the latest CDC estimate on relative risk between age groups, children up to 17 have the lowest risk of hospitalization, including infants. That means, for infants the risk of hospitalization is about 1/10th of the risk for the oldest age-group. It might be added that their risk of death is less than 1/330th of the oldest age-group. This is low risk, not high risk.
Still, according to the authors of this study, infants are “at high risk for complications of coronavirus disease 2019,” contrary to all evidence, referring to a source that doesn‘t address the matter....<<<Read More>>>...