COVID: Here’s what’s deadly

Lynn Fleming thinks “parents fighting masks are using children as political pawns in a deadly game.” While we know the Delta variant is more contagious than COVID-19, it is also less severe. Infection rates are high, deaths are extremely low. It will run its course and the population will develop greater immunity to future variants. Just like the flu, COVID will always be with us.

Now let’s talk about the kids. Children are not at risk from COVID-19. This is a fact. Can they get it? Sure. But they are largely asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms. And it is also a fact that children are not very good at spreading the virus. Adults get the virus from other adults.

I invite you to listen to Martin Kuldorff, a public health scientist and professor of Medicine at Harvard. He points out that 1.8 million children in Sweden’s schools and day cares had no testing, no masks, no social distance. There were 0 deaths from COVID. If they were sick, they were told to stay home, that was it.

Now let’s talk about the vulnerable. There is a more than 1,000 fold increase in risk for death from COVID between the oldest and the youngest. Thank God the vaccine is freely available to our most vulnerable. Our seniors will be protected from serious symptoms or mortality. This is not the case in other areas of the world, like Africa and South America. So, while we greedily coerce those in America who are not at risk to take a vaccine they do not want, the poor and elderly in other countries have no vaccine available.

ANNE PATTERSON

Coeur d’Alene