Dr. Peter Hotez on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1451
SUBJECT: HEALTH
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Now we realize from studies coming out of China that was published in the journal called Pediatrics put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics, that about 10% of infants are getting very sick with this virus.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The study Hotez references is Dong et al., published in Pediatrics (March 2020), which reported that 40 of 379 infants (under age 1) among 2,143 pediatric COVID-19 cases in China were classified as severe or critical, a raw proportion of about 10.6%, matching the "10%" figure cited. A subsequent peer-reviewed commentary (Salemi et al., Early Human Development, 2020) found this raw proportion overstates true illness severity because it was not adjusted for case underascertainment: many mild or asymptomatic infections in the broader population were never tested or counted, inflating the apparent severity rate among the cases that were captured. After correcting for underascertainment using published epidemiological modeling, the same commentary recalculated the severity proportion for infants at 40/3,662, or about 1.1%, roughly a tenfold reduction from the raw 10.6% figure. The Dong et al. study itself also noted that two-thirds of the pediatric cases were "suspected" rather than laboratory-confirmed, and that suspected cases had more than twice the severity rate of confirmed cases (7.4% vs 2.6%), suggesting some illnesses attributed to COVID-19 may have had other causes. The claim is traceable to a real number in the cited study but presents an uncorrected, likely overestimated statistic as an established finding about infant illness severity.