I've been thinking about this lately with regard to my very young child. There's been a lot of discussion lately about lowering the age at which the mRNA vaccinations can be given. But if it's true that natural immunity + vaccination) is stronger than vaccination alone, is it worth it to leave her unvaccinated against Covid, at least for now, in order to get some natural immunity?
My friends and family are sort of aghast at that, but I can't get a good read on how dangerous Covid is for little children. As far as I can tell from the stats, hardly any 1-4 year olds have died from Covid (60 in about two years [0]), so it doesn't seem like a big risk. Of course, there's "long covid" and all the sort of long tail risks and concerns, but intuitively it feels like if the disease is not that deadly and dangerous when you're that young, there'd also be less risk of all these other side effects we're seeing, which tend to correlate, as far as I can tell, with how severe the disease was for the person in the first place. (I'm not seeing lots of folks with "long covid" who had it asymptomatic to begin with, for example.)
There's the argument about getting vaccinated to help others but I don't think that really applies here. Asking babies to "take one for the team" (in the context of my question here where immediate vaccination inhibits long term protection) for grandma seems kind of backwards, if you ask me.
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku
My friends and family are sort of aghast at that, but I can't get a good read on how dangerous Covid is for little children. As far as I can tell from the stats, hardly any 1-4 year olds have died from Covid (60 in about two years [0]), so it doesn't seem like a big risk. Of course, there's "long covid" and all the sort of long tail risks and concerns, but intuitively it feels like if the disease is not that deadly and dangerous when you're that young, there'd also be less risk of all these other side effects we're seeing, which tend to correlate, as far as I can tell, with how severe the disease was for the person in the first place. (I'm not seeing lots of folks with "long covid" who had it asymptomatic to begin with, for example.)
There's the argument about getting vaccinated to help others but I don't think that really applies here. Asking babies to "take one for the team" (in the context of my question here where immediate vaccination inhibits long term protection) for grandma seems kind of backwards, if you ask me.
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku