Thread by @Loretta_Torrago

In her latest Substack, @ProfEmilyOster contemplates Covid’s risk to kids under 5 where she carries on her well-established traditions of ableism and a self-centered approach to public health. 🧵
emilyoster.substack.com/p/covid-risks-…

Predictably, Oster begins by bemoaning the sad state of affairs for parents (her) who need to “dispense” with children “to an outside location” (her phrasing, not mine). Quarantines, Oster tells us are “untenable”. Okay, so are pandemics but here we are.
antoniobuehler.medium.com/the-emily-oste…

Oster then moves to addressing a problem she just invented: the exclusion of kids from the world.

Oster says this imaginary exclusion is unjustified because kids are “low risk” for serious outcomes.

This is Oster’s signature move: focusing on the threat to individuals while ignoring other people, including high-risk people, that kids could infect.
Admittedly, the world outside ourselves can be an egregious imposition on self-indulgence.

Probably because she has been chastised for ignoring vulnerable kids, Oster addresses them by telling them they should find someone else to talk to.

Moving on to her central thesis, that the 0-5s should be in daycare, or, at the very least, dispensed to a location other than home, Oster cites a study which stratifies by age, but also separates risks for those with comorbidities from those without.
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

True to her word, Oster looks only at kids w/out comorbidities because her kids are healthy, her time is precious & she’s already said they should talk to someone else. Here is Oster’s summation of the study’s data.

What Oster neglects is that when parents think about Covid risks to kids, they think of all of them. In other words, parents aren’t asking “What’s the chance of hospitalization?”, “What’s the chance of PIMS/MIS-C?” as if they were separate questions.

What parents want to know, I think, is: “What’s the chance of a bad outcome?” which, in terms of the study she cites, amounts to: “What’s the chance of Covid hospitalization or worse?”

Oster loves to say her detractors, myself included, don’t like data. It’s true, I don’t like data, but I dislike lies, misrepresentations and the threat Oster poses to humanity even more. So I made my own chart in which I use both data and addition.

The chart gives the chance of individual bad outcomes upon infection. I then added the individual bad outcomes to get a total risk of *C-19 hospitalization or worse* aka “Why it’s worth protecting your kid from infection.”

6 things worth noting:
1.I assumed a small fraction (25%) of ICU admissions were direct to ICU,
2.I assumed all deaths had previous hospitalizations,
3.Hospitalization w/therapy is proxy for Hospitalization for (as opposed to w/) Covid,

4. Risk = infections (305,044) divided by number of adverse outcomes.
5. Source (from study) below.
6. I didn’t check Oster’s math. 😊

The upshot is the risk of hospitalization or worse for under 5s is 1/608.

Oster thinks this number is so small we have to “contextualize” it which for her means “make it look even smaller” by comparing it to a whole bunch of other things.

Personally, I’m not a fan of contextualizing. 1st, I have no problem seeing a 1/608 chance as a reason to protect kids. 2nd, these comparisons are irrelevant. The risk of hospitalization for diarrhea doesn’t have anything to do w/deciding whether to expose kids novel pathogens.

Of course, no dismissal of Covid's risks to kids is ever complete without a dismissal of Long Covid, and a new paper gives Oster just what she needs.

Without going into detail, there are issues w/the paper including that the meta-analysis includes a paper that isn’t on LC along with various papers restricted to what are essentially lab measurements (which is a peculiar choice for a study alleging to be looking for symptoms).

Even so, as is predictable by now, Oster sees nothing to worry about; probably because she thinks this won’t happen to her kids. I say that because I can’t think of any other reason to be dismissive.

Like any (other) parent, the preservation of my kids’ brains is of interest to me so, looking at the symptoms, I ask myself simple questions like: Are disorders of smell, headaches & cognitive difficulties reflecting SCV-2’s attack on the brain? That’s how I “contextualize”.

Summing up her article, Oster doesn’t want to be bothered redoing the calculations she’s already done (for, presumably, Delta), so she goes with Omicron isn’t a “strong reason” to reanalyze: “strong” doing a lot of the work.

I guess churning out Koch funded propaganda takes a lot of time & Oster just hasn't gotten to yesterday's news which reported that the majority of Omicron hospitalizations were amongst 5s & under.
The Substack is from today.
But why redo calculations?
nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavir…

For those interested, (not Oster), here's the breakdown of risk for kids with comorbidities. Because I care.
End.