KFF Analysis Finds Firearms are the Leading Cause of Death for Children in the United States but Rank No Higher Than Fifth in Other Industrialized Nations
Firearms are now the number one cause of death for children in the United States, but rank no higher than fifth in 11 other large and wealthy countries, a new KFF analysis finds.
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Guns – including accidental deaths, suicides, and homicides – killed 4,357 children (ages 1-19 years old) in the United States in 2020, or roughly 5.6 per 100,000 children.
In each of the peer countries, guns kill fewer children than motor vehicles, cancer, congenital diseases, and other injuries, and often behind other conditions such as heart disease.
The U.S. is the only country among its peers that has seen a substantial increase in the rate of child firearm deaths in the last two decades (42%). All comparably large and wealthy countries have seen child firearm deaths fall since 2000. These peer nations had an average child firearm death rate of 0.5 per 100,000 children in the year 2000, falling 56% to 0.3 per 100,000 children in 2019.
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation, study by Matt McGough, Krutika Amin, Nirmita Panchal and Cynthia Cox, Jul 08, 2022
FAIRFIELD — Solano County has reported the first death of a child due to Covid-19.
The infant, younger than 1 year old, died about a month ago and had been ill for about a month prior to that, Dr. Bela Matyas, the county public health officer, said in a phone interview Monday.
“It’s tragic,” he said.
It takes the total of Covid-related deaths to 342, the county reported.
The child “did not appear to have any underlying health conditions . . . and, of course, the child was not vaccinated,” Matyas said.
Children that young are not allowed to be immunized.
Matyas said the infant contracted the virus almost certainly by being exposed to someone with the disease, probably a family member or friend, and, he added, it was far more likely from someone who had not been vaccinated.
That is especially true if the person who transmitted the disease was asymptomatic and did not know he or she was infected.
While the Public Health Division is investigating in hopes of learning how the child was exposed, Matyas said a clear answer may not be possible.
“We may never know,” Matyas said.
The county reported 128 new coronavirus cases, 112 of which were from the past three days. It takes the total to 47,892.
The number of residents who were hospitalized Monday with the disease was 19, with six in intensive care units. That compares to 22 hospitalized Friday and five in the ICU, the county reported.
The 10-day daily case average was 37.7, up slightly from Friday’s report of 36.9.
Vaccination rates held steady at 66% of residents 5 or older being fully vaccinated and 77% of that population receiving at least one shot. There have been 84,334 booster shots administered, up from Friday’s total of 81,294, the county reported.
The report stated 18.7% of 5- to 11-year-olds have received a vaccination shot.
Fairfield added 36 new cases to take its total to 12,803. Vallejo added 33 for a new count of 13,950. Vacaville had 12,651 cases after 38 additions, the county reported.
Suisun City (3,390) added four new cases; Dixon (2,643) added nine; Benicia (1,660) added seven; Rio Vista (644) added one; and there were no new cases in the unincorporated area of the county (151), the report states.
The seven-day positivity testing rate was 5.4%, up from 5% Friday.
County public health officials do not post case updates on Tuesdays. The next update is scheduled late Wednesday afternoon.
In January 2015, an outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland in Anaheim spread across California and eventually throughout North America. All told, the virus made its way to seven U.S. states, Mexico and Canada, infecting 159 people, the vast majority of whom were unvaccinated.
A Center for Disease Control and Prevention study of the Americans who were infected found that most were either too young to receive a vaccine or declined to be vaccinated, citing personal reasons. The natural conclusion was that unvaccinated people put young children at risk. And that “personal belief exemptions” from vaccine mandates can be dangerous loopholes that empower irrational objections to inoculation and endanger public health.
In the aftermath of this outbreak and several others in California, state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a pediatrician, introduced legislation to crack down on lax personal belief and medical exemptions for otherwise mandatory school vaccinations. That bill, SB277, received huge pushback from the burgeoning anti-vax movement, with actress Jenny McCarthy among others, stirring up opposition. But the effort was eventually victorious; it is now very difficult in California for parents to get their kids a medical or personal exemption from traditional childhood immunizations for 10 serious illnesses (such as polio) without legitimate reasons.
Just because your kid is allergic to cats doesn’t mean they’re allergic to vaccines. They need to get their shots.
And yet concessions made to pass the bill now have implications for COVID. SB277 did not anticipate future outbreaks of new diseases that would require vaccination. As such, the law includes an amendment that allows the governor and public authorities to unilaterally issue new vaccine mandates “only if exemptions are allowed for both medical reasons and personal beliefs.”
And so, with COVID exemptions, we’re effectively back to square one. Gov. Gavin Newsom and his public health authorities can (and did) mandate Food and Drug Administration-approved COVID shots as a prerequisite for attending in-person schooling. But removing the same specious personal belief and medical exemptions that we did in 2016 will require the Legislature to act.
It should. Californians have already proven themselves adept at exploiting the old exemptions. And the incoherent opposition to safe and effective vaccines, sadly, is now stronger with backers who are far more formidable than McCarthy.
All indications are that COVID will become endemic, meaning it will be with us in one form or another in perpetuity. While this sounds terrifying, it doesn’t have to be. Vaccines can protect us from serious COVID illness and death. But none of us are born immune. Just like with measles and polio, each passing generation will need to be inoculated. Without vaccines, this virus will continue to kill. Which is why mandating shots for the young is so essential.
Schools are the logical place for society to make its stand and stop COVID’s deadly rampage for good. Everyone is entitled to an education, but vaccination is an appropriate exchange. Moreover, the current status quo of constant testing and quarantines is unsustainable.
“Think about how much schools are spending on COVID control,” says Pan. “Those are resources pulled away from primary education. Vaccinating kids means less spending on COVID control and more on their education.”
The Legislature is out of session until 2022. But when it returns, amending state public health laws for the COVID-era will be imperative. California doesn’t just need to pave the way for mass COVID vaccinations, it needs to give public health authorities the flexibility they need to deal with future emergencies.
What happens when a new pandemic arises that requires a new vaccine? The legislative process takes time. And in public health emergencies, time is too precious to waste fighting the Jenny McCarthys of the world.
The Pfizer COVID vaccine is now fully approved by the FDA for people age 16 and over. Emergency authorization for kids 12-15 is in effect, and it could be granted for kids age 5-11 by Halloween.
Vaccine mandates work. They can and will help neuter COVID and keep it from re-emerging as a deadly threat. They can do the same for future infectious diseases where safe and effective vaccines are made available. But danger will linger if California doesn’t put a permanent stop to the fake excuses for avoiding vaccines.
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
Covid-19 cases among US children and teens jumped 84% in a week, pediatrician group says
CNN, by Jen Christensen and Theresa Waldrop, August 4, 2021
Almost 72,000 children and teens caught Covid-19 last week – a “substantial” increase from a week earlier, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported Tuesday.
The group counted 71,726 new cases from July 22 – 29. That is a “substantial” increase from the nearly 39,000 cases reported a week before, and five times as many kids who were sick at the end of June. The definition of a child varies by state but generally includes those up to age 17 or 18.
After decreases in reported cases over the past couple of months, the July numbers started trending upward again as the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus became dominant in the country.
“That’s high and considering the fact that we are vaccinated now, what that’s telling us is that unvaccinated people are getting infected in higher numbers because the virus is more infectious with the Delta variant,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chief of the division of infectious diseases in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford Medicine and chair of the AAP committee on infectious diseases.
More than 4.2 million kids have tested positive for Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. Children and teens represented 19% of reported cases in the latest weekly data.
Related Article: Here’s how schools should handle a Covid-19 outbreak, experts say
The report comes as schools have just started or will soon start, with some requiring no masks or social distancing, and as cases in many parts of the country are surging and hospitalizations at levels not seen in months.
At one Georgia school, more than 100 students were in quarantine after nine students and five staff members tested positive for Covid-19 just days after the first day back.
Children under 12 years old are not eligible for any of the three vaccines currently used in the United States, and the fast-spreading Delta variant has put them especially at risk, health experts say.
Vaccines are being tested now in children as young as 6 months, but they probably won’t be available for children younger than 12 for several more months.
Related Article: Kids are starting their third Covid school year. Here’s what to know.
“Our sense is because kids can’t get vaccinated, parents should clearly be vaccinated themselves, and if their kids are 12 and older they should be vaccinated as well,” Maldonado said.
Dr. Trey Dunbar, president of Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, agrees, saying that children are being victimized by a pandemic that has a simple solution: adult vaccination.
“Covid is a preventable disease,” he said. “It’s hard for us as pediatricians to see kids affected by a preventable disease. Children aren’t like adults. They don’t have the choice to get vaccinated. Parents are responsible for those choices. So yes, it makes a big difference when adults make decisions for kids and adults make decisions that could maybe prevent diseases that we see in children.”
Leaders around the country are taking various approaches to keep children safe, from Utah Gov. Spencer Cox saying the state will give away KN-95 masks to children, to Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson calling on the state’s legislature to amend a law in order to give school districts the flexibility to require masks.
The academy, which represents pediatricians, pointed out that severe illness still appears to be rare among children. The number of hospitalizations has remained steady through much of the pandemic. Children accounted for 1.3%-3.5% of the hospitalizations, depending on the state.
Seven states have reported no child deaths from Covid-19 during the pandemic. As of Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 526 deaths among children ages 0-17.
Among the some 25 million US children between 12 and 17 years old, about 10.9 million have been vaccinated with at least one dose of vaccine, according to CDC data.
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