Small but mighty: Vaccinating Canadian kids could see rates jump nearly 7%

Vaccinating young kids against COVID-19 could bring Canada's overall vaccination rate to around 85 per cent, experts say.

Kids across Canada have started to receive their first shots of COVID-19 vaccine, and experts say this could be a big help in Canada’s pandemic fight.

“The difference is going to be huge. The impact is going to be huge,” said Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.

Health Canada approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children aged five to 11 on Nov. 19, and the first pediatric doses arrived in Canada days later. Some provinces have already begun administering shots.

Children in this age group account for around eight per cent of the Canadian population, according to demographic data from Statistics Canada, though it varies province to province.

Currently, about 78 per cent of all Canadians have at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Assuming that young children get vaccinated at the same rate as their peers aged 12-17 – 87 per cent of whom have at least one dose – vaccinating this age group would bring Canada’s overall vaccine rate to nearly 85 per cent.

“It’s a huge dent in the total number of people who don’t have protection,” said Caroline Colijn, a professor of mathematics and Canada 150 Research Chair at Simon Fraser University, who works with the B.C. COVID-19 Modelling Group.

Predicting exactly what impact that extra few percentage points of vaccine coverage will have is complicated, Colijn said. Epidemiologists have to take into account current caseloads, understand how children interact and how they transmit the disease to others, which has changed significantly over the course of the pandemic, she noted.

With the data they have, Colijn said, in B.C. it would steepen the current slight decline in cases. In other provinces, she thinks vaccinating children would cause a decline in case numbers or at least have them level off.