Texas
That seems sub optimal.
I’m laughing so I don’t cry
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I fully expect New York to make the Trump kids wards of the state in 2024.
Narrator: you poor man
He is giving cover for the back to school crowd. It is going to get a lot of people killed.
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South Australia reintroduced some mild restrictions (household gatherings max 10 people, pubs etc can only serve alcohol to patrons seated at tables).
We have 8 active cases. Victoria has put the wind up everyone.
Lmaooooooooo
Two new studies, though from different parts of the world, have arrived at the same conclusion: that young children not only transmit SARS-CoV-2 efficiently, but may be major drivers of the pandemic as well.
According to the results, children 5 years and younger who develop mild to moderate Covid-19 symptoms have 10 to 100 times as much SARS-CoV-2 in the nasopharynx as older children and adults.
The researchers found that although young children had a somewhat lower risk of infection than adults and were less likely to become ill, children age 14 and younger transmit the virus more efficiently to other children and adults than adults themselves.
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Time to send them back to school!
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Some places already have! Ahead of the curve!
Those studies are pretty much bullshit.
According to the results, children 5 years and younger who develop mild to moderate Covid-19 symptoms have 10 to 100 times as much SARS-CoV-2 in the nasopharynx as older children and adults.
Bolded is a near nonexistent group. The vast majority of children don’t develop symptoms, so symptomatic children are never going to be a major driver of the pandemic.
On to the Trento study:
The greatest risk of transmission to contacts was found for the 14 cases <15 years of age (22.4%); 8 of the 14, who ranged in age from <1 to 11 years) infected 11 of 49 contacts.
Their sample of people < 15 years of age was 14 individuals. No conclusions can be drawn from this. We know from other studies that “less than 15 years of age” is too broad a category in any case.
These are very weak studies and there’s nothing here to challenge the conclusion of the very large German study, which was that children 10 and older are efficient spreaders of the virus but children under 10 are not. Empirical studies elsewhere reached similar conclusions. I will agree that sending children to school while the country is awash in the virus is going to spread it, but once you have the virus under control it’s very unlikely sending young children to school will launch a large new outbreak.
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All returning travellers too?
How do we know this? Where did you get this data from?
This is what I found: UpToDate
“In a systematic review of 7480 children <18 years of age with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection, information about symptoms and severity was available for 1475 [28]. Among these, 15 percent of cases were asymptomatic, 42 percent were mild, 39 percent were moderate (eg, clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia without hypoxemia), 2 percent were severe (eg, dyspnea, central cyanosis, hypoxemia), and 0.7 percent were critical (eg, acute respiratory distress syndrome, respiratory failure, shock). There were six deaths in the entire study population (0.08 percent).“
From CDC:
“ In one study, up to 13% of pediatric cases with SARS-CoV-2 infection were asymptomatic.”
And
“The largest study of pediatric patients (>2,000) with COVID-19 from China reported that illness severity ranged from asymptomatic to critical:16
- Asymptomatic (no clinical signs or symptoms with normal chest imaging): 4%
- Mild (mild symptoms, including fever, fatigue, myalgia, cough): 51%
- Moderate (pneumonia with symptoms or subclinical disease with abnormal chest imaging): 39%
- Severe (dyspnea, central cyanosis, hypoxia): 5%
- Critical (acute respiratory distress syndrome [ARDS], respiratory failure, shock, or multi-organ dysfunction): 0.6%“
Now I don’t know if those were more self-selecting since we don’t do as much contact tracing so 15% asymptomatic should be too low, but I haven’t seen anything say having symptoms is almost nonexistent. Just that the severity is usually mild or moderate.
I guess the good news is we will start to find out! Y’all can thank certain counties in the US for being the guinea pigs to collect data on how much kids spread this thing.
Personally I think respiratory is a much much bigger factor than smear for transmission so kids under 10 being 1/2 as contagious and kids over 10 being more like adults makes sense with greater capacity to spread via larger lungs breathing out. But it can also be true that their snot has higher amounts of viral load, it’s just that it’s not spreading from their snot often, so it doesn’t matter much for the spread.
Using California’s data as an example, 0-5 year olds there make up 5.8% of the population but only 2% of COVID cases. Then here’s a document from Kaiser from July 29 summarizing the current state of knowledge:
Another expert panel organized by the National Academies of Medicine reported that “compared with adults, children who contract COVID-19 are more likely to experience asymptomatic infection or mild upper respiratory symptoms”, and that over 90 percent of children testing positive will have no or mild symptoms.
So children have only a third of the risk of testing positive and 90% of those who do test positive will have no or mild symptoms. Under those conditions just saying “we tested children who were symptomatic and they were drenched in virus” doesn’t really mean anything. Also, that study only establishes that children have high viral loads, not that this necessarily translates to higher transmission. Admittedly it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t, but perhaps the virus doesn’t become airborne so readily from children or something, and just measuring transmission directly is better evidence than trying to infer from viral load. The Kaiser article says this:
For example, multiple studies indicate that children have viral loads and shed virus in similar amounts to adults, which might indicate risk of transmission is similar across age groups. Without a doubt transmission from child-to-child and child-to-adult can occur, but a number of studies find children, particularly young children, are less likely to be source of infection in households and other settings, compared to adults. A number of these studies conclude that a majority of documented transmissions between children and adults have occurred from adults to children, rather than the other way around, but more detailed information is needed to fully understand this dynamic. There is new evidence, including from a recent comprehensive study from South Korea, suggesting there is an age gradient in terms of transmission risk from children, meaning younger children (<10 years old) are less likely to transmit compared to adults, while older children (10 and older) may transmit at levels similar to adults.
They have a good summary of what has happened when schools have opened elsewhere as well. It’s a solid article.
Not the same universe as children 0-5.
As long as the sick kids stay home. I think what seems to be the direction of the view of spread is that this thing is pretty polarized by no/low spread on one end and super spread events on the other.
ANY large gathering of people threatens a super spreader event.
I’m hopefully that low frequency of symptomatic kids plus sick kids staying home plus mask wearing outweighs the shear potential number of kids in classrooms.
No or mild
Not no
I agree they are mostly mild but I haven’t seen anything say almost all are asymptomatic like you are claiming.
If they truly are asymptomatic most of the time, then they won’t stay home since they aren’t symptomatic.
So they’ll go to school and spread it around making it much much worse.
Also they aren’t mandating masks most places so that won’t be there in schools.