Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
Many people seem to have taken the "kids are less impacted when infected" and converted it to a "kids can't get infected" or "kids don't spread the virus" conclusion.
The provincial government where I live was recently excoriated for coming up with one of the weakest back-to-school plans in the country, which effectively suggested the status quo with next to no supports or funding for schools to deal with COVID-19 unless and until outbreaks start occurring.
From what I can tell based on the policy and subsequent public statements made by the officials, they seemed to have been operating under the assumption that kids can't be infected or are less likely to be infected with COVID-19.
The lack of critical thinking on display when it comes to this virus, especially by policymakers, is one of the most disturbing facets of this pandemic. I really get the impression that many are not putting in an effort to maintain even a baseline level of up to date knowledge on this evolving situation. It's distressing when you see people espousing opinion based on outdated information from 4 months ago.
With that kind of thinking, I can understand that they don't actually have any idea about the transmission of Covid amongst children; they don't need that information as it has little bearing on the required conclusion.
I have presented something of a leading question. I know what I think the answer is.
Society has decided that kids have to go back to school because anything else is just too inconvenient. The lame excuses about lower transmission rates and the risk of developmental impairment are conveniently put forward to justify the decision.
Saying "clinical" here is a bit of wishful thinking. Clinical testing would mean random selection and random assignment in a medical experiment for kids. With an adverse hypothesis.
From a national perspective of producing competitive individuals in an increasingly international landscape? Yes, they do. They need at least a few hours of their day coached by an institution to direct their energies towards their studies.
Otherwise Khan Academy would already solve 85% of the problems, because it is closely aligned to state curricula.
Note that the median teenager (or lower), while possibly college-bound, is not really qualified for college and is not very academically inclined. Also note that they are decidedly not middle class or higher. They are constantly pushing and testing boundaries without the received wisdom to know when they have gone too far.
One of my biggest criticisms of modern day K-12 education, especially high school, is that it is mostly glorified baby sitting given the low amount of learning that takes place at the lower-end schools. The high school curriculum that we use today is roughly based on the same curriculum from late 1800s to early 1900s when only about 6% of people graduated from high school, and pretty much all of them went to college or a two-year school of some sort. High school was specifically designed to cater to college bound students.
A variant of this curriculum is used today even though approximately half of college-age students don’t go to college (including most high school dropouts). The curricular mismatch is a joke, and the only real reason high school can be justified for these students is, unfortunately, tax-funded babysitting.
At that age you're fully capable of staying home by yourself and following online instruction, at minimum.
It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other useless activities.
Disclaimer: this obviously varies from country to country.
The same politic groups, that would argue that teachers are the heroes of society that we can't live without, are now arguing that school must under no circumstance resume. We must indefinitely put off in-person schooling.
What? Is this the best we can do? Does this even measure up with scientific reality and risk calculation? Are teachers really that simultaneously important/unimportant? If the grocery baggers are working and handling the crisis well enough, so should teachers. It's clear that there's a class element to "essential worker." And this entire profession that seems to love the praise they generally receive from the left about how indispensable they are, are now suspiciously absent from the essential worker category.
You can only conclude that the social and mental development of children isn't essential.
If they cared enough, they'd use this crisis as an opportunity to start hiring younger teachers in droves to build up the workforce with relatively inexperienced teachers who aren't at much risk from the virus (at least compared to some 50-60yo teacher). But I suspect unions would stop at nothing to impede adaptive, efficient, and creative solutions.
If there were a real plan in place to ensure safety, and if adults were willing to sacrifice in other areas like going out to bars then school could work if we had consistent isolated groups.
As it stands, at least in Ontario, there's been a strong push to "open up" bars and restaurants etc which to me is public mixing incompatible with the mixing of students in a class. Pick one: school or everything else.
But you're not owning up to the possible irreparable damage to children's psyche, mental wellbeing, career prospects, etc.
At least be honest about the tradeoffs. If I'm saying that people are overestimating risk and people will blame me for associated mortality and effects of the disease, it's like the other side of the debate is never that open and explicit about the very serious drawbacks and costs of their choices.
Let's be fair to both sides: you're responsible for suicides, health effects of prolonged isolation, etc.
That will be the case if they continue school.
> Let's be fair to both sides: you're responsible for suicides, health effects of prolonged isolation, etc.
With that logic you are personally responsible for suicides, health effects of bullying and school slavery, etc.
> and people will blame me for associated mortality and effects of the disease
I do not think that blaming people for expressing their opinion will be worth much to the family who just lost one of its members. It is cheap for you to accept blame and worthless to these that suffer due to following the same belief.
You're also misinformed about the risks to young people. An unknown amount of mild courses (I've read about estimates of 10%) result in long-term damage, just like with SARS. These people are called COVID long-haulers.
Somehow kids are able to survive summer holidays or home schooling without grave developmental consequences.
This is purely about economic consequences and it's a calculated risk that the outbreaks in schools will be able to be contained without having to shut down the entire educational system again and forcing families to both work and take care of their kids.
Having the family (often only parents) around and maybe 1-2 friends from time to time is vastly different from a class of 20-30 pupils.
Also remember that the summer holidays you mention don't disappear. They additionally increase the time of separation. Especially this year where a lot of families won't go on vacation as usual.
No, absolutely not.
You can say the lockdown might not be "emotionally" healthy. But it seems it has been healthy in a more literal sense.
The schools that opened up, did minimial distancing, and then shut down because they detected cases? Yeah, they were clearly in the wishful thinking camp.
America is so polarized and so many stupid people are convinced that there's some political basis behind the fact that masks prevent spreading, that the US won't be able to just recover from this until we have some combination of effective treatment and/or vaccines. We'll continue to have a lot of big cities, mostly liberal places probably, where people try to distance and wear masks (but not enough). Magical thinking won't make this go away, unlike a lot of other things that you can wish away or ignore when you are in a really rich country.
This is true for many subjects of interest (e.g. climate change), but of importance are the quality of the studies and where scientific consensus is going.
The paper only tested for viral RNA, not for infectious virus. Given that some people are clinically recovered but still have RNA in the throat, and that presence of viral RNA may not equate with live virus (see a Nature paper from two months ago), this is a rather severe limitation.
Note that they may as well be: but you can't infer this from these results.
The patient group consisted of "children ... presenting to urgent care clinics or being hospitalized for confirmed/suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children", so they are pre-selected , making the role of the full amount of children in the population in spreading harder to know.
As you note, that doesnt rule it out either.
So I feel this is a wasted opportunity.
The best study I'm aware of suggests an age-dependent effect, with older kids infecting others at about the adult rate, but young kids causing very little secondary infection: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-childr...
This virus would have to be unlike any other respiratory virus for young kids not to infect others.
I've had this prediction I'd like to test with the right data that parents of young children, and those that work with them, have lower covid rates than demographically matched controls.
Ironically this would suggest that socially distancing kids might decrease immunity in the long run.
As I wrote elsewhere in the comments, the researchers have equated the quantity of viral RNA with viral load. Studies in adults have shown that this is not always the case. There's no guarantee that there is active virus there (unless you try to infect cells with what you got from the swab).
But the problem was that kids under 10 turned out to be not affected in numbers. People still thought that it is dangerous for or with kids. Statistics worldwide didn't support that.
The picture is now a bit clearer, that kids just belong to the huge group of asymptotic cases dealing with the common cold as every year.
The potential to infect older people is still disputed. Current studies clearly dismiss that. Only the press and politicians are fascinated by that idea. The biggest COVID-19 spreaders are still young women at around 30, unlike with the influenza.
As it is, I'm left thinking that science is built on limited understanding, stating only what the evidence to hand supports, and that the problem with the understanding of the general public is that they want certainty now when there are only more questions and areas to research for now.
Research should not extrapolate far beyond what can be proven, regardless of how the result is filtered and distorted by consumers of social media.
No it doesn't. In the first paragraph it says:
> The infected children were shown to have a significantly higher level of virus in their airways than hospitalized adults in ICUs for COVID-19 treatment, according to Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Mass General Hospital for Children (MGHfC).
So they SHOWED in patients that it DOES have higher viral load. First paragraph.
The second paragraph contradicts your reading further:
> The study, “Pediatric SARS-CoV-2: Clinical Presentation, Infectivity, and Immune Reponses,” was published today in The Journal of Pediatrics.
> “I was surprised by the high levels of virus we found in children of all ages, especially in the first two days of infection,” says Lael Yonker, director of the