To get an age-specific infection fatality rate (IFR) for Omicron variant COVID, you can begin with the age-specific IFR for wild-type (Wuhan-1) COVID, and then step it down. Research on over 2 million persons combined revealed that Delta variant COVID was only 42% as fatal as variants before it — and that Omicron was only 31% as fatal as Delta.
That means that Omicron is just 13% as fatal as original COVID — making it much safer to get than the common, seasonal flu.
But if that is the case, then there should not be a lot of kids dying. Yet numbers coming out of the EuroMOMO system — tracking weekly deaths in over 20 nations throughout Europe — reveal high recent death in kids. Here is a chart running from the 3rd week of January 2022 to the 2nd week of January 2023:
With an expected weekly child death count of around 350, the Euro Area saw 471 weekly deaths in Week 49 of 2022. That’s approximately 35% higher than the expected death for kids under age 15.
But by the third week of January of 2022, Omicron variant COVID predominated essentially everywhere in the world:
This means that the only type of COVID infection which could have caused death in Week 49 of 2022 was Omicron variant COVID.
Vital Perspective
To get perspective on whether Omicron can be blamed for the high recent death in kids, a useful comparison is to compare the yearly risk of death by Omicron to the yearly risk of death by lightning strike.
A conservative estimate of spread for Omicron is the highest-reported spread in the literature — the Denmark Blood Donor study, with evidence that, in the original 4.5 months, Omicron infected 66% of adults.
Combining the spread with the death risk, you get the total yearly risk of death by Omicron. The National Weather Service puts out stats on 30 years of lightning strikes and lightning deaths.
The result?
Child risk of death by Omicron is almost twice the risk of death by lightning:
[click image to enlarge]
If any lightning strike is used instead of only those that cause death, then a kid is over 5 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to die of Omicron.
The upshot:
COVID didn’t (couldn’t) do it. It didn’t cause the steep rise in recent death. So what is it that is killing kids?
Reference
[lightning kills 43 people per year] — National Weather Service. https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds
[66% attack rate of Omicron; first 4.5 months exposure to it] — Volume 21, 100479, October 01, 2022. Seroprevalence and infection fatality rate of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Denmark: A nationwide serosurveillance study. Published: August 05, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2022.100479
[true IFR by age] — Pezzullo AM, Axfors C, Contopoulos-Ioannidis DG, Apostolatos A, Ioannidis JPA. Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population. Environ Res. 2023 Jan 1;216(Pt 3):114655. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2022.114655. Epub 2022 Oct 28. PMID: 36341800; PMCID: PMC9613797. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/
[From ~700,000 cases confirmed by sequencing, Delta was 42% as fatal as Alpha] — Table 3. Number of confirmed and probable cases by variant as of 11 October 2021. UK Technical Briefing #25. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-sars-cov-2-variants-technical-briefings
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is 31% as lethal as Delta, making Omicron much safer than the seasonal flu] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/