HARTFORD, Conn. — The Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be approved for people aged 5 to 11 within the next month, so let’s look at how much protection, and what type of protection, that age group can get from the vaccine.
To do that, though, let’s start by looking a little more closely at the mortality rates of the age group on the other end of the spectrum.
As of the most recent update from the state, which came on Thursday, Sept.23, of the more than 2.4 million people fully vaccinated in Connecticut, 98 of them have died from a breakthrough infection. Of those cases, 78 have been at least 75 years old.
Compare those numbers to the total number of COVID-19 deaths, since the start of the pandemic, in the almost entirely unvaccinated 0-9 age group: one. There have been four deaths in the 10-19 age group as well.
So why get kids aged 5-11 vaccinated? There is more to worry about than death.
“One out of five COVID-19 infections currently are in children, and the month of August saw a record 30,000 pediatric hospitalizations,” said Dr. Syed Hussain, Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Trinity Health of New England.
“So while infections have remained lower, they have gone up over the last several months, and we don’t want our children to come down with moderate to severe COVID-19 disease or complications related to that.”
Also, consider that, even as naturally protected against death that kids are, they are still more protected if they’ve been vaccinated – and the people around them stand to benefit, too.
The above graph shows the number of new COVID-19 cases in each of the state’s updates, which usually come five days per week. The number of new cases in the (highly unvaccinated) 0-9 age group is in blue, while the number of new cases in the (highly vaccinated) 80+ age group is in orange.
Two differences stand out. The first thing to note is how few cases there were in kids at the start of the pandemic when parents were keeping them at home and away from school. At the same time, the virus was running rampant through retirement homes.
From there, the two curves mostly rose and fell in unison, but that changed in mid-February, around update number 250, which is when vaccines started rolling out in earnest.
From there, the 0-9-year-old curve continued to mirror the curve of the general population as a whole, seeing bumps in April, and again this summer, thanks to the delta variant. Meanwhile, as more and more 80-year-olds were getting vaccinated, their case levels dropped off to the point of nearly flat-lining.
The expectation is that vaccinating our kids will lead to a similar dampening of cases in that age group, which should make it harder for them to transfer the virus to an older acquaintance, who may be more likely to die of the virus.
Tim Lammers is an anchor at FOX61 News. He can be reached at Tlammers@fox61.com. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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