The chances of children dying from coronavirus are very low, according to a new study.
Research out today shows only 25 children and young people in England died from Covid during the first year of the pandemic – just 0.005% of those who were infected with the virus.
Nineteen of the deaths were in children with an underlying health condition, with complex neurodisability accounting for 13 of them, according to results from three studies conducted by academics from universities around the country.
Dr Elizabeth Whittaker, one of the researchers and a consultant in paediatric infectious diseases at Imperial College London, said: “This data would suggest you have to have a very low risk of the vaccine to justify giving it to all healthy children.
“You can do the maths,” said Dr Whittaker. “It’s a very low risk and it’s self-limiting.”
“The CDC [US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control] and the World Health Organization [WHO] are doing an investigation to explore how many of those young people needed critical care or immune-modulating therapy.
“That information is still pending and I suspect the JCVI are waiting for that data to come through.”
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