COVID-19 myths that refuse to die, from undue concern about children to variants and vaccines

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If you’re reading this in Canada, you live in one of the most vaccinated countries on earth when it comes to COVID-19. Last weekend, the rate of Canadians who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 officially passed the U.S.

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The effects have been dramatic. Last Saturday, a mere three Canadians died of the disease, and COVID-19 hospital wards across the country are emptying out. By any available metric, Canada has successfully vaccinated its way out of the pandemic and is now one of the safest places on earth for COVID-19.

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Despite this, we continue to hold on to some of the Western world’s strictest lockdown measures, while public opinion continues to assign far greater danger to COVID-19 than it now deserves. Below, a list of some of the most pervasive myths still clinging to the novel coronavirus, as well as the science as to why they’re wrong.

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COVID-19 is dangerous to children

Only 25 children in the U.K. died from COVID-19 complications in the first year of the pandemic.

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The same period, from March 2020 to February 2021, saw 97,000 total British COVID-19 fatalities, as well as the deaths of 3,105 children from all causes, including cancer, drownings and car crashes. This month, a National Health Service study concluded that any child under 18 who contracted COVID-19 in the U.K. had a 99.995 per cent chance of surviving.

And the U.K’s child death rate is high by global standards. Only 397 children aged 18 and under in the U.S. have died of COVID-19, against more than 49,000 American children who died of other causes (and more than 598,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths total). In Canada, the number of under-18 deaths is 14, roughly 0.1 per cent of the country’s total COVID-19 death toll. Since the pandemic began, at least five times that number of Canadian children have died of drowning.

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What’s more, children’s inherent immunity to COVID-19 has been common knowledge ever since the first North American COVID-19 cases started hitting Washington State. As early as February 2020, it was clear from early case data out of Wuhan, China that the disease’s risk to children was roughly on par with the flu.

These numbers are an indictment of many child-centric lockdown policies, such as school closures. The extremely low risk of COVID-19 to children is why many epidemiologists are now cautioning against universal vaccination of teenagers given recent accounts of the Pfizer vaccine being linked to heart inflammation among youth.

While the side effect is extremely rare, the benefits that a COVID-19 vaccine offers to teenagers is so vanishingly small that it may not be worth even a minor risk of vaccine injury. This is why the U.K. is not recommending jabs for most children under 18, while countries like Germany and the Netherlands are only advising vaccines for children with pre-existing conditions. As the British Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation put it in a July 15 statement, “the health benefits in this population are small, and the benefits to the wider population are highly uncertain.”

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Masking and self isolation is necessary after full vaccination

Of the 159 million Americans who have received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine since January, only 1,063 of them have subsequently died of a “vaccine breakthrough” case of the disease.

For context, given current U.S. death rates, in the same period that cohort of 159 million people likely saw 142,000 deaths due to heart disease, 10,000 deaths due to suicide and 11,000 deaths due to flu or pneumonia.

In recent weeks, virtually all U.S. fatalities from COVID-19 have been occurring among adults who are unvaccinated.

A recent British study meticulously followed frontline workers for four months, testing them every single week to track who was contracting COVID-19. Of 3,975 workers monitored, only five were infected with COVID-19 in spite of being vaccinated — and all five made full recoveries.

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Public Health Ontario, meanwhile, found last week that a mere 0.02 per cent of fully vaccinated Ontarians have been infected by a “vaccine breakthrough” case of COVID-19. And given the province’s utterly plummeting rate of COVID-19 deaths (three days this week have seen zero fatalities), it’s safe to assume that almost all of those breakthrough cases are back to work.

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In short, we have known for several months that if you are two weeks past your second dose of vaccine, your risk of dying from COVID-19 is about the same as dying from flu or tuberculosis. Despite this,  public health authorities across Canada have stubbornly continued to require masking or self-isolation regardless of vaccination status.

The U.S.-based Centres for Disease Control has been similarly prone to overcautious public health orders (only in May did they stop recommending social distancing for the fully vaccinated) but last month CDC director Rochelle Walensky was assuring the fully vaccinated that it no longer made sense to wear masks.

The variants are deadlier and resistant to vaccines

Despite initial fears that vaccines would be useless against the Delta variant, which was first identified in India, June data out of Public Health England found the opposite. In some cases, vaccines were better equipped to ward off the Delta variant than against the earlier Alpha strain, which was first identified in the U.K., but has been overtaken by Delta. Two doses of AstraZeneca, for instance, were 92 per cent effective at preventing hospitalization from Delta variant infection — as compared to 86 per cent effective against the Alpha variant. More recent data has the protection levels even higher.

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Just this month, Canadian data similarly emerged to show that full vaccination was just as effective against the Delta variant as against any prior strain of COVID-19. Even a single dose of vaccine was shown to “provide good to excellent protection against symptomatic infection and severe outcomes caused by the 4 currently circulating variants of concern,” reads a preprint paper out of the University of Toronto.

New strains such as the Delta variant are more troublesome for the simple fact that they’re more contagious, and are thus better able to rack up new infections. Earlier this year, despite a wave of reporting that COVID-19 variants were more dangerous to young people, research soon showed that while more people were contracting the variants, they weren’t any more likely to die or require hospitalization once infected. In the words of an April study in The Lancet gauging the severity of the Alpha variant, “we did not identify an association of the variant with severe disease.”

• Email: thopper@postmedia.com | Twitter: TristinHopper