undefined | Better HN

0 pointsthu21115y ago0 comments

It's hilarious that in a thread about misinformation the idea that children are immune is being treated as not true. Death rates for COVID for people under 20 are ~zero. Babies are in fact immune, perhaps due to relatively lower levels of ACE2 expression compared to adults.

HN readers seem to have totally lost it w.r.t. COVID and misinformation. It's practically guaranteed that in any thread about misinformation/FB/Twitter/etc someone will state something about COVID that's true and then describe it as misinformation, or state something about it that's false and then decry the conspiracy theorists who don't believe it.

0 comments

kelnos5y ago

First off, you're moving the goalposts a bit here. No one claimed that the death rate for people under 20 was anywhere near that of older age groups.

Your assertion that "babies are in fact immune" is demonstrably false: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-... shows 20 deaths for children under 1 year old. Presumably many more than that were infected but survived (unfortunately covid.cdc.gov is timing out for me right now and a quick search didn't give me infection rates for that age group).

Yes, the number is small compared to cases in older people. But "babies in fact are immune" is in fact the same kind of misinformation you're railing against.

thu2111OP5y ago

Remember you're dealing with a very noisy, FP-prone test, and there have been millions of tests by now. At those levels there are bound to be some babies that tested positive and then died, so you can't infer from it that COVID actually killed them.

To put it in perspective, according to the UK govt's own analysis, it's very likely that all currently reported positive infections are false positives!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse