Trump advisor says 'young people not at serious risk' of coronavirus

An advisor to US President Donald Trump has claimed that young people were “not at risk for serious disease” from COVID-19. Dr Scott Atlas, who was appointed on August 11 in the COVID-19 task force, has repeated his support for President’s ideas of reopening. Previously, he’d said that the idea of not reopening schools after summer breaks was “hysteria and ludicrous”. 

His comments which were made at an interview to an American media outlet comes in contrast to the experts which have claimed that children were at risk too. According to an analysis by American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association,  there has been 90 per cent increase in the number of COVID-19 cases among children in the US over the last four weeks.

Increase in cases among children

Meanwhile, another report by US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that last 570 cases of children with MIS-C, a rare but serious coronavirus complication in children, has been associated with fever, rash, inflammation and shock.  Ten out of those 570 have died due to the infection.

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As risk against children rises, a joint report by the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund, released on August 12, stated that more than 800 million children globally are not able to wash their hands at school. The world is steadily coming out of lockdowns, invoked to stop the spread of the contagious virus. In this step of unlocking there are guidelines for reopening schools during the pandemic, which emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness to reduce transmission of the virus and recommend schools to enforce regular hand washing, among other precautionary measures.

The report reveals there are 818 million children all around the world, who do not have access to basic handwashing at school premises. Out of these 818 million children, only 355 million children mainly from Northern Africa and Western Asia have the availability of water, but not soap. The remaining 462 million have no access to both water and soap for handwashing.

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