Medscape and WebMD Continue to Claim That 12% of Children With COVID Are Hospitalized
The article came out about a month ago with this title: 12% of Children With COVID Are Hospitalized, Study Says. There were 29 comments, most of which criticized the misleading title. Why? Well, the article starts out with a bang:
About 12% of U.S. children with COVID-19 were hospitalized in 2020, and nearly a third of those had severe disease that required mechanical ventilationor admission to an intensive care unit, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open on Friday.
Really? Then why does the last paragraph in the article say this?
Children represent about 13.5% of the COVID-19 cases in the country, according to the report. Among the 24 states that provide data, children represented 1% to 3% of all COVID-19 hospitalizations, and less than 2% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization.
So why the contradiction. Well, it seems Carolyn Crist, the author, doesn’t know statistics. Here is were she came up with the 12%.
More than 20,700 children with COVID-19 had an in-patient or emergency department visit, and 2,430 were hospitalized with COVID-19.
It seems that OF THE 20,700 kids who went to the hospital there were 2430 hospitalizations. What the author doesn’t seem to know is that MOST kids have minimal or no symptoms with COVID-19 so we don’t even know the denominator. She just looked at the sickest kids and made a clickbait headline. Shame on you because it perpetuates the fear around CV19 for kids which shouldn’t be.
But what about Medscape and WebMD? You have had a month to take this article down or fix it and you haven’t. Shame on you for being poorly trained and irresponsible. Do you not give a crap about the things you publish?
Medscape and WebMD? What are those? Never signed up or used them. Perhaps that was a smart move on my part. So glad to be retired now.
Go ahead and call me a conspiracy guy, but this stuff doesn’t seem accidental. No Pfizer has been authorized to administer the COVID vaccine to kids 12-15, and they are pushing to give it to 2 and older beginning in the fall.
This is BULLSHIT and it is wrong. We’re I still in the clinic, I would recommend that parents NOT vaccinate their children against COVID-19. They are not at significant risk for illness, and we do not have adequate data for any long-term vaccine effects. It makes sense to vaccinate the 70-over crowd; at present it is indefensible, and I think unethical, to vaccinate kids absent any data demonstrating the need.
You know what they say….there’s lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics…..