Does the existence of this protein explain asymptomatic infections? I wonder what percentage of the population have it.
Our [unvaccinated] 8 year-old had Covid last Spring and his symptoms lasted exactly one entire morning.
PCR swab tests were done in school on day 1, on day 2 I got a frantic phone call from his school at 7am saying "keep him home, he has Covid!".
We would not otherwise have known, since he had precisely a bit of a headache. No cough, no fever. He took a paracetamol and sat in front of the TV. By the afternoon the headache was gone.
He tested PCR positive again on day 6, so got to enjoy the full 10 days' mandatory isolation, thanks to the rules in place here at that time.
The interesting question is: what percentage of young and/or healthy people actually had a severe case of Covid? We know an awful lot of people who've had mild-to-insignificant cases...
Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice. At the moment we’re at “almost nothing”.
Kids of wealthy families with parents with flexible jobs will be fine. Not every kid is in a home situation like that.
Like if isolating that kid doesn't prevent any further infections, then it isn't doing any good. If isolating them for 3 days prevents a couple other kids from getting infected, it's less clear.
Using PCR tests to evaluate clearance doesn't make sense though, since they can be positive if there are fragments but no viable virus.
It's a cost and time issue. The cost of filtering snot, inoculating a culture dish of infectable cells with the filtered snot, waiting a couple of days for the cells to show signs of infection (cell swelling or bursting), and then running a PCR test on the cells in the culture dish. With high enough throughput you could probably do this for $50 or there about, and maybe three days, to verify whether they were technically still infected three days ago.
Just waiting a couple days after symptoms abate is also going to bring most of the benefit of testing for clearance.
The weekends do count, out of the 10 days they'd be out, up to 4 would be weekend days. So, really they'd have missed around 6 or 7 days of actual school. But it could also happen to fall in a public holiday, which will reduce the number of days even more. And there are school breaks throughout the year.
I find it hard to believe that many people are living such in the edge that, if their kid has to miss a week or so of school in a year their finance and jobs fully crumble.
I think you're vastly underestimating how often kids exhibit symptoms potentially consistent with Covid during a school year.
Catch C19, recover, get the sniffles in the next 2 months, get PCR tested, require a parent to take off work and the kid to sit out 10 days [possibly more than once] is not a reasonable policy IMO.
Which is why the EU issued the "recovery certificate" and put it on the same basis as a negative test, and why our schools didn't test recovered children (to clarify: were mandated not to test recovered children) after they returned to school after having Covid.
This was always true, and we never sent an obviously poorly child to daycare/preschool/school.
I've lost count of the number of times I've picked up one of our kids from daycare/preschool/school before Covid after a phone call along the lines of "your child has spiked a fever/vomited/has had an accident and should probably see a doctor".
Wasn't this typically based on common sense by the parties involved, though?
Is there any evidence this is different for Covid-19 than the vast sea of other viruses kids catch but we don’t PCR test for?
The kids around the world ended up having to take nearly two years off of school and it was shown to have a massive effect on their development.
Example had COVID, not a one-day mild illness so it might affect other children worse than the kid. I'd like to know what the negative effect of that really is, my gut feeling is that it's zero. People often make it sound like they end up insufficiently educated and socially isolated which is bs in my opinion.
Unless we are doubting the description of the parent, example had mild illness (the patient's experience of ill health) for less than one day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752442
To a first-order approximation based on data from my three kids and their classes/schools, pretty much all the children in all the kindergarten and school classes got Covid last year. All their teachers got it, too, including the vaccinated ones.
Early last year I recall talking to my (then) 8 year-old about his best friend, who was stuck at home for a fortnight after testing positive Covid [this was before we'd all had it]:
me: "How is he?" son: "What do you mean?" me: "Is he OK?" son: "Why wouldn't he be?" me: "Is he getting better?" son: "He's not poorly, he's just positive, Daddy!"
Based on who tested postive (and indeed negative) when, it appears our 8 year-old gave it to my OH, but not to his 12 year-old brother (with whom he shares a bedroom). When my OH had it, she didn't give it to me, either, and I was testing very frequently back then due to work & travel requirements.
There is a hypothesis that the risk of catching Covid from someone may be related to the relative blood types. Based on the veeery small sample size of our immediate family it's definitely not the case that Covid always spreads quickly round a family group, despite us not having changed anything about our family routine when somone in the house was positive. We didn't send anyone to a separate bedroom, no-one wore a mask at home, and we all sat at the meal table together just as normal.
FWIW My 12 year-old and I had Covid approximately two months later, when he caught it in his school and brought it home.
According to the authors the protein binds “like velcro” effectively immobilising and preventing infection.
Symptoms would occur if sufficient cells were infected thus the second case sounds plausible to a degree.
I am not a virologist so take everything with a huge grain kf salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucine_rich_repeat_containing...
But maybe different people generate different amounts at different speeds?