What Cost Keeping our Youth Safe During Covid

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Most of us have no idea of the epidemiology (the study of diseases in different groups of people) that sits behind the pandemic, and I suspect most of our politicians have only a cursory understanding of the level of scientific certainty that sits behind their various policy decisions.

Questions such as;

Just how lethal is the Omicron vs Delta, do cloth masks work, why are children so resilient from serious symptoms, at what level do we reach Covid immunity, how close is too close for the timing of boosters, how fast do the boosters wear off, do boosters overload the immune system of children, is long Covid a normal immune overreaction to a nasty viral infection, will natural immunity last a lifetime, What is the risk of Myocarditis and Pericarditis for teenage boys?

All good questions you never hear addressed by our political leadership as they prefer to treat us all as simpletons, there to be told what to do, rather than levelled with about the complexities of the policy choices they face.

The reality is they are dealing with a mix of medical known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns, but they prefer to act like they know what they are doing.

Our political masters like to present their views as if they are operating in a world of certainty and they know what is best for us all.

As someone who has struggled with this lowest common denominator level of information provided by the state government, I have resorted to hunting around for scientific papers and sources that explore the various arguments for and against everything from lock downs, mandatory vaccinations to mask wearing.

What is surprising is how hard it is to find good balanced articles which set out the facts, as most of the material is either penned by extremists or is too scientific to be helpful to the lay reader.

However, I recently came across a pod cast which is for anyone who wants to hear the issues debated back and forth by smart people who are capable of balancing the medical, economic and social challenges of handling this pandemic, it’s called The Drive by Dr Peter Attid - Covid Part 1 and 2.?

It’s a clever fast moving discussion over three hours between three of Americas brightest medical researchers that helps fill in the gaps left by the fear mongering that we have had to put up with from the ABC, the Premier and the state’s Chief Medical Officer.

The focus is on the data, presenting facts not the fear and being honest where there is uncertainty in the data and where the data is close to conclusive.

The one thing it does conclude is the vaccines work, the older, the sicker you are the more important you are to be vaccinated and boosted.

So, no questions there, but the debate gets interesting when the question of the risk reward of vaccines for under 35 year old’s vs the risk of Myocarditis and Pericarditis and how many boosters we should be giving young healthy people when their risk of death is so low compared to older people.

The pod cast explores the science around the impact on the immune system of loading up children with a third or fourth booster vs the public policy goal of lowering the speed of infection and risk to vulnerable older groups.

It makes for an interesting ethical debate which almost none of our 95 state MPs seem to want to enter into other than the Liberal Tjorn Simba who got pillared in the media recently for questioning the Premiers decision to walk away from the Feb 5 opening date. (Simba is a politician to watch, he is smart and articulate and has a big future in front of him as a future leader.)

The pod cast examines the cost of ‘keeping the community safe’ and questions the allocation of resources. For instance it noted that 10 times the number of under 35 year old’s across the United States have died of suicide or car accident compared to Covid over the last two years.?

This got me thinking about how many of our own country kids we have lost across Western Australia over the past two years and in fact we will lose over the next 12 months to the two killers of suicide and vehicle accidents.

Each year we lose around 60, 13 – 29 year old’s to suicide and 40 or so killed or so lost on our deadly country roads.

To put this in context, to date Australia has had 6 deaths from 0 – 19 year old’s and 13?20 – 29 year old’s with nearly all of them having serous underlying health issues vs 3718 deaths from older Australians from 2.5m reported cases.

You don’t need to be a mathematician to know where the risk lies, just as we all don’t need to be told about what kills our youth in country areas.

Somehow, I think the government and the community has lost site of the bigger picture, while every Covid related death of an older person is painful and sad for family and friends the loss of a young person from an accident or suicide is a tragedy.

When the accounting for Covid is finally added up, will we have a government willing to spent $5.5 billion dollars across the state to pump prime the economy and keep our Covid death numbers in 2000 and 2001 to just 9 but is that same government willing to go on accepting the annual cull of 100 young lives across WA as a result of country road deaths and suicides.

If so, then the government has failed to balance short and long term risks with Covid becoming the only game in town.

Yes, the state government did allocate $35m for wheatbelt road shoulders and $25m for mental health as past of the $5.5 billion spend but it was just 1% of that spending spree. In hindsight more of that money should have been poured into our health services and regional roads.

While the government did bump up the mental health budget by 10.9% for this Covid year it was in response to what’s coming with Covid. The bigger question is will the funding be there for the long term and will it help reduce youth suicide.

As for country roads the last budget allocated $950m into Wheatbelt roads over the next four years which is about the annual spend on Metro Net rail, the network that will cost a billion dollars a year to run and which won’t unclog our roads, as we don’t all work in the CBD.

Again, are we getting the balance right, should the government have used Covid as an excuse to rebalance our transport spend to where we get the bast bang for our bucks and with it help reduce the states road toll.

My greatest fear is the Premier will get WA through the pandemic and declare he has done a great job keeping us safe but after 3 years there will be 300 tragic preventable under 30 year old deaths on the state’s mortality figures with 100 more to come each year.

We need to consider the long term implications of throwing all our resources at winning the Covid battle and saving older lives or those of anti vaxers but losing the war of attrition which are killings that are taking our youth.

No doubt I will get pillared for raising such questions in the middle of the pandemic, but while we have compliant sheep sitting on the ALP backbench cheering on the Premiers every announcement and an opposition paralysed in fear in being on the wrong side of the public panic on Covid then someone needs to question the group think that is WA politics. Before those who disagree howl me down have a listen to The Drive podcast and ask yourself are we doing enough to save the 100 young lives that will die from suicide or on country roads this year and how many boosters should we inflict on our children to keep anti vaxers safe. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-current-state-omicron/

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-current-state-omicron/yourself are we doing enough to save the 100 young lives that will die from suicide or on country roads this year and how many boosters should we inflict on our children to keep anti vaxers safe.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-current-state-omicron/