Can one seriously compare COVID-19 to a TB plague? Especially in context of schools where mortality rate for the school aged appears to be less than any seasonal flu on record.
There is no good data to back that up. Since we've been keep track, most kids have been staying home, away from other kids. Schools have been closed, playgrounds have been closed, and so on.
There is a good chance it doesn't affect them as much, but it's not entirely clear since they haven't been socializing as much as adults.
The data we do have says that COVID-19 is 3 times deadlier than the flu for kids 5-17, and 190 times deadlier for kids 0-4, but that's because the numbers are small: https://i.insider.com/5ef234caf34d051bc821d0d8?width=700&for...
Also, lots of adults work in schools. 1/3 of teachers in the US are over 50.
And the grand parents and obese parents are vulnerable as all merry hell.
In Iceland, they did extensive testing, and genetic tracing of infections.
Children infecting other children was extremely rare. In almost all cases, it was adults infecting them.
There was only a SINGLE case of a child infecting an adult.
https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/blog/hunting-down-covi...
Lockdown effectively places every family into its own bubble. Family members can only get infected by someone interaction with the outside world. If the kids stay home and only the adults interact with the outside world, than we would expect to see basically zero child 2 child infections.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/heal...
What we don't know is how effective kids are as transmission vectors. If COVID19 spreads rapidly through a school and kids can get thier caretakers sick, thats a real problem. The limited data we have in suggests that not only do young kids not have limited disease, they also don't spread it easily, but all the data I've seen is almost anecdotal.
That's just straight up wrong. According to the CDC, as of June 23, COVID-19 was three times deadlier than the flu for kids 5-17, and 190 times deadlier for kids 0-4:
https://i.insider.com/5ef234caf34d051bc821d0d8?width=700&for...
It's best to say "the fatality rate is near the same order as the flu for school age children"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openi...
The article is arguing a point, but it also links to a lot of the other papers I've seen.
Note that "not as transmissible" doesn't mean "not transmissible". It's entirely possible for the disease to be harder to transmit in kids but still be enough to sustain community spread. I think we don't know yet.
That's not a full-throated endorsement of reopening schools, but it should inform a risk/reward based approach to what institutions should close or open and when.
Currently, the virus is out of control. We might be able to bring it back under control. The Israeli experience suggests that, since half their cases were from schools, opening schools doubles R. There's no measure that will be realistically implemented in the next month that would cut R in half.
It could be that this is the least bad of a set of options. Convince me.
Universal masking can cut R substantially, but it requires high levels of compliance [1]
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.037...
Schools are a particular problem. Getting kids to consistently and correctly wear masks is hard. Getting kids to follow social distancing rules is hard too.
Bringing a bunch of poorly compliant people together to sit in the same room with 25 other people is gonna be a big challenge.
We do know that kids can be transmission vectors and there is nothing to suggest they cant be.
TL;DR - "doesn't kill you" might still maim you for life
- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-ef...
- https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/coronavirus-long-t...
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53269391
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/06/corona...
“We don’t know yet if the encephalopathy is more severe with Covid-19 than with other viruses, but I can tell you we’ve been seeing quite a lot of it"
That is probably the type of information we should be taking from these media reports. Given that there are over 14 million cases globally, we should be looking for patterns that impact tens of thousands, not edge cases that impact dozens or hundreds. With such a closely-studied and brand new disease, we are bound to find a lot of interesting and worrying cases. There are plenty of rare symptoms from other diseases too, we just don't talk about them much because they are not new and they are rare.
Since there is a lot of proof the current virus is airborne it helps to be in the open air or at least have a good ventilation system.
Schools could beat the spreading of the virus with well ventilated classrooms.
And for that matter: the US could beat the virus with good ventilated rooms. Note that dry air from airconditioners helps airosols to keep floating.
Without fress air: wear a mask!