Spain’s child COVID-19 deaths – reported as the “highest rate” among developed countries in a recent study – are based on false data.
The Lancet study, “Children and young people remain at low risk of COVID-19 mortality,” alleged that “the highest rate of deaths per 100 000 children was in Spain.”
A total of 54 minor deaths were reported in the study, 28 of which were in the “0 to 9” category and 26 were in the “10 to 19” category.
The accuracy of the data, however, has been disputed by the Spanish Society of Pediatric Infectology and the Spanish Society of Pediatric Intensive Care.
Spain’s Ministry of Health echoed the medical bodies’ criticisms:
“Indeed, it has been detected that some autonomous communities made mistakes when incorporating the data of minors, but they are already being reviewed to correct it.”
One hypothesis for the error was that COVID victims over 100 were recorded as minors.
“Those errors are when introducing people of more than one hundred years, it has happened that they are figurative as that those deceased have 1 year, or 2, or 3 instead of 101, 102 or 103 “, considers one of them,” Pere Soler, pediatrician of the Infectious Pathology and Pediatric Immunodeficiencies unit of the Vall d’Hebron hospital explains.
