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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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All kids live with adults, and they get high exposure to the virus when their family gets infected. From this we know that kids have a low mortality rate.

Conversely, their parents and grand parents get infected by the little plague carriers returning from the plague pit and general viral exchange facility that is school.

And the grand parents and obese parents are vulnerable as all merry hell.

Nope.

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...

Could this simply be because schools were closed? If there is no child 2 child interaction, there cannot be an infection via this vector.

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.

Schools and kindergartens were never closed in Iceland for children under 16.

There is a study from South Korea that says kids from 10 and up can spread the virus just as well as adults.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/heal...

Has a statistical analysis been done or are you reasoning inductively?

Also, reports out of Florida are showing that 1/3 of the kids have lung damage on x-rays, even if they were 'asymptomatic.' It's not clear if that damage will be permanent.

TL;DR - "doesn't kill you" might still maim you for life

The bar for spreading fear-mongering like this should be considerably higher than some unknown "reports out of Florida".

There have been plenty of reports if you'd like more specifics; e.g.

- 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...

These are scattered media reports.

“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.

No, at this point we can be pretty certain that this disease doesn't affect young children as badly as flu. Plenty of kids have tested positive for COVID19, but almost none have died. This disease is so pervasive we'd see excess showing up in that age group and we just don't. Kids just don't seem to get as sick as adults.

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.

The long term effects of flu are known. The long term effects of Covid-19 on any demographic are unknown. Polio killed less than 2000 people per year prior to the development of the vaccine, but impacted many more.

> No, at this point we can be pretty certain that this disease doesn't affect young children as badly as flu

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...

That chart is extremely misleading. You can't compare estimated flu cases and deaths with confirmed COVID19 cases and deaths.

Mea culpa, I had the <1 numbers of flu in my head as the <10 number- I shouldn't have said "as badly". However, those charts aren't great- as someone else noted comparing estimated flu numbers with confirmed COVID cases is problematic. In my local region, a randomized serology study suggested that we have at least 3x as many infections as confirmed cases, and a raw extrapolation of deaths to IFR rates suggests its even higher.

It's best to say "the fatality rate is near the same order as the flu for school age children"

This is not true. The experiment has been run. In June, 47% of COVID cases in Israel were from schools. The schools there are now closed.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openi...

The road from anti-coronavirus paradigm to rampant infection in this country of 9 million people followed two months of almost total lockdown. May 17 also was the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former rival Benny Gantz swore in their “corona emergency government,” whose sole declared purpose is to fight the spread of the virus. Netanyahu’s decree that the nation’s entire school system would reopen was a political flourish to signal everything was under control.

One would think that coronavirus was one of those mind-control fungi that makes you do stupid things that increase its spread.

There are several other studies that are indicating that spread isn't as high among children as adults. See https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/children-over-age-...

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.

Sure, look at the risks and the rewards. It's quite clear that if we run the fall semester in person, we will get a burn-through. It's not so much of a risk as it is a cost.

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.

> There's no measure that will be realistically implemented in the next month that would cut R in half

Universal masking can cut R substantially, but it requires high levels of compliance [1]

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.037...

That’s why I say realistically. You could do a $50 billion blitz campaign to promote/provide masks, and you could increase usage, but the holdouts now are the ones that are difficult to convince.

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.

Covid is more deadly then flu in literally any age group. It also takes more time to cure. Kids do handle covid better then adults, but kids do handle flu better then adults too.

We do know that kids can be transmission vectors and there is nothing to suggest they cant be.

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