Psychological stress in a pandemic: Lauterbach: Children were exposed to enormous pressure

Psychological stress in a pandemic
Lauterbach: Children were exposed to enormous pressure

Clear words from SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach: Children had suffered enormously from the pandemic in the past few months and developed fears of infecting their relatives with the corona virus. He again advocates vaccinating her now. Not all colleagues share this view.

The SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach has criticized the way children are treated in the corona pandemic as wrong. The fact that children were told that they were not allowed to go to school because otherwise they could become infected with the virus and endanger their grandparents or, in the worst case, even kill them, was “completely wrong,” said Lauterbach in a joint “FAZ” interview with the Director of the Department of Pediatric Cardiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the University of Munich Hospital and President of the German Society for Pediatric Cardiology, Professor Nikolaus Haas.

Professor Nikolaus Haas

(Photo: picture alliance / – / Hospital of the University of Munich / dpa)

“The children were exposed to enormous psychological pressure. They had bad feelings of guilt,” said Lauterbach. Doctors Haas said: “The children were scared during the pandemic: Children, when you come home from school, you infect your grandma and kill her, so you have to stay at home. That was of course nonsense.”

Lauterbach advocated vaccinating children against the coronavirus and allowing them to “start a largely normal school year”. “We should offer them what we treat ourselves,” he said. Haas contradicted this: “I am not an opponent of vaccinations and I also want the children to return to a normal life as quickly as possible. But we do not need to vaccinate them for this,” said the doctor in the double interview with Lauterbach.

Data from Israel and England showed that Delta was nothing worse for children than the previous variants or the wild type, according to Haas. “We also know that outbreaks in schools happen at the same time as outbreaks in communities. The virus is carried into schools by adults. It is extremely rare for children to infect each other, their teachers or parents.” Haas advocated keeping schools open “in compliance with hygiene rules” and vaccinating teachers instead of children.

In this case, however, Lauterbach fears new “big outbreaks” after the summer vacation. “I don’t think that we can use ventilation and light masks to prevent children from becoming infected with one another. (…) There would be an infection with everything that goes with it, for example children who have to be quarantined because they themselves or the person sitting next to them are infected. And when they are back from quarantine, another child falls ill and everything starts all over again. We would have another disaster school year. ”

He considers it dangerous to strive for a “contamination” of children and adolescents, Lauterbach added. He does not want to “do a field experiment by saying that we let our children become infected with the delta or even worse variant”. Pediatric cardiologist Haas considers this fear to be “speculative”: “We have experience with one and a half years of Corona in Germany, we have seen hundreds of thousands of infected children, and nothing has happened to very few. Even Indian paediatricians do not recommend vaccinations for children.”

The SPD politician Lauterbach said in the interview that “in four weeks at the latest” there will be “a lot more vaccine than vaccinated people”. “If we would only vaccinate the children who already want that, a considerable number would come together. At the start of school, many would have at least one vaccination. And for the hard time from November onwards, the second vaccinations would be through If students could manage 60 to 70 percent, we could teach as we did before. ”

Lauterbach does not share fears that vaccination could have more risks than benefits for young adults. “We have vaccinated millions of young adults in other countries and seen that nothing bad has happened.” The body of a 15-year-old does not differ categorically from an 18-year-old, said Lauterbach in the “FAZ” interview. “I think the idea that vaccination is more dangerous than illness is absurd.”

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