No Omicron Parties!

One of my earliest memories growing up was staying home from school for a week to recover from (and not spread!) a bad case of chickenpox. The story goes that once my older brother developed the classic symptoms, my parents decided to put me in the same room and expose me to his respiratory secretions so I could get infected and “get it over with.” No varicella vaccine existed way back when, and I have no doubt my parents wanted to get it over with. Sticking me in the same room as my brother solved their dilemma while I got sick, fevered and covered from head to toe with the tiny water blisters that itched like crazy and left a couple of scars. To be fair, though, I did get it over with.

With the more infectious but apparently less damaging Omicron variant now dominating the COVID landscape, some parents have borrowed the idea of holding “Pox Parties” so popular long ago. Sandee LaMotte discovered that “Omicron Parties” are all the rage:

“It’s caught on like wildfire,” agreed Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.”

And it’s widespread, coming from all types of people, the vaccinated and boosted and the anti-vaxxers,” he added, with a warning. “You’d be crazy to try to get infected with this. It’s like playing with dynamite.”

 

It turns out chickenpox parties weren’t completely harmless because chickenpox isn’t always mild or benign in kids or their parents. For example, a parent who never had chickenpox when they were young could have their own life threatened as an adult by catching the virus from their newly infected child. And we should remember that before the vaccine was approved in the United States in 1995, there were up to 4 million cases, 13,000 hospitalizations, and 150 deaths per year, most of them in young children.

Several pediatric experts gave LaMotte a few good reasons why Omicron parties designed to infect as many people as possible aren’t such a good idea:

IT’S NOT A BAD COLD

Significant fever, body aches, swollen lymph nodes, sore throats and heavy congestion are often reported even in milder cases of Omicron variant, Murphy said, leaving people debilitated for days.

“People are talking about Omicron like it’s a bad cold. It is not a bad cold,” Murphy said. “It’s a life-threatening disease.”

 

While Omicron might not pose much of a risk for a young and otherwise healthy child, the same may not be true for the people they come in contact with:

A recent study of over a million people published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the risk of a severe outcome from COVID-19 was higher in vaccinated people who were 65 or older, people with weakened immune systems, or people who had at least one of the following health conditions: diabetes or chronic kidney, cardiac, pulmonary, neurologic or liver disease.

It is true that if you catch the Omicron variant of COVID-19, as opposed to the Delta variant, “you’re less likely to be hospitalized, less likely to go to the ICU (intensive care unit), less likely to be put on a mechanical ventilator and less likely to die — and that’s true of all age groups,” [Dr. Paul] Offit said.

“But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a severe illness,” Offit added. “It’s just less severe. But you don’t have a 0% chance of dying. You should never want to get infected.”

 

Parents need to think beyond the relatively mild symptoms of coronavirus because so many who acquire the infection go on to develop symptoms that linger for some time after the acute infection clears. The annoying loss of taste and smell aren’t the only problems:

YOU COULD GET ‘LONG COVID’

Called “long Covid,” the phenomenon is characterized by such debilitating symptoms as shortness of breath, severe fatigue, fever, dizziness, brain fog, diarrhea, heart palpitations, muscle and abdominal pain, mood changes and sleep difficulties.

Severe forms of long COVID-19 can damage lungs, heart and kidneys, as well as your mental health and may qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act and other federal statutes.

“We’re still trying to understand long Covid,” Offit said. “Because we don’t understand it, I wouldn’t be so quick to want to get an infection from a natural virus.

 

With adult and pediatric hospital beds and intensive care units filled to capacity nationwide, one thing America doesn’t need right now is more cases of COVID-19:

YOU’LL STRESS THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

Staffing shortages are expected to grow even more as frontline health care workers are either infected or forced to quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19. The dearth of health care staff couldn’t come at a worse time[…]

Elective surgeries are being cut, and health care officials are worried that the nation’s health system won’t be able to do its job.

“The health care system is not just designed to take care of people with Covid. It’s designed to take care of kids with appendicitis and people who have heart attacks and get into car accidents,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, told CNN on Sunday.

“And all of that is going to be much, much more difficult because we have a large proportion of the population that is not vaccinated, plenty of high-risk people who are not boosted,” he added.

 

Why would any parent tolerate exposing their kids to potential danger when there are safe and highly effective ways to protect them?

Instead of intentionally letting them get sick with a dangerous pandemic virus, adults should be doing everything we can to protect kids from infection. Making sure they and the people around them are vaccinated and boosted if eligible, wearing face masks when indicated (indoor public spaces like schools), and avoiding people who are sick is always the better strategy than simply “messing with Mother Nature.”

 

(Google Images)

 

source http://www.thepediablog.com/2022/01/18/no-omicron-parties/