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Comment by gammarator | Hacker News Reader

The study does not support the article title. Viral load is not the same as contribution to epidemiological spread.

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...

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Which intuitively makes no sense, as any parent of toddlers or kindergarten kids can testify.

This virus would have to be unlike any other respiratory virus for young kids not to infect others.

I think the rationale is that the primary way SARSCOV2 is spread is via droplets in the air. The most effective way of doing that is coughing and sneezing, i.e. being symptomatic of a respiratory infection. Children are generally asymptomatic with SC2 and likely remain infected for shorter time frames as SC2 never really gets a strong foothold. These factors make the spreading of SC2 from children likely.

My theory is that there's cross immunity to other coronaviruses. This is now supported by molecular research but it's been my hypothesis all along. Basically little kids are so exposed to so many other coronaviruses they have greater immunity to sars-cov-2.

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.

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