[0]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
So it doesn’t seem like the lower viral load is making much of a difference.
The numbers here are very high (in one of the most vaccinated US states) but only if you look at the 18+ number or something similar.
We still have plenty of unvaccinated kids spreading it around and they end up spreading it to some vaccinated people.
In Ireland we have, today, rates substantially lower than the peak in January. The variant prevalent in January was far less infectious, and most stuff was closed in January (there was a sort of timid partial reopening of some pubs and restaurants the previous November, which was reversed at the end of December, no events with over 50 people were allowed, everyone was still told to work from home where possible, etc). Now we have a much more infectious variant, almost everything is open (though people were advised to work from home where possible last week), and the rate is still lower.
That actually looks like reasonable evidence that the vaccine _is_ somewhat effective at lowering the R number, to me. At any rate, something is clearly reducing infection; despite a much more infectious variant, and far, far more social mixing, the R number is lower than it was in January.
How can you possibly know such a thing? The mask is more about reducing your spread to others, do you have reliable data on how many people you would have infected in lieu of masking? No, you don't.
So it's unrealistic to expect masking to prevent your spreading it to close friends/family whom you're in frequent contact with.
But it lowers how much you're emitting past the mask while standing in line at the grocery store.
Your take on this seems incredibly self-centered.
If it turns out the answer is lower and similar respectively, then it would seem vaccination of children makes little difference in the grand scheme.
Two years in and we still make policy with many unknowns. Why don't we have a better understanding of the effects of policies over the last two years? I suspect (hope) we will have a 9/11 style commission in the US to study covid and policy for many years
That logic would seem to apply to all groups who cohabitate and is orthogonal to my query.
This sheds no light on my original query which seeks to compare viral loads and transmission rates between unvaccinated kids and vaccinated adults. First, vaccines were not available during the study. Second, it only considered one direction, kids to adults. One would need to do a multi way with more age groups. We know the disease is skewed w.r.t. age.
I'm not sure what data there is on children and long term covid impacts?