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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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From the point of view of someone who is immunocompromised this seems like the bare minimum we can do as a society to protect the vulnerable.

Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice. At the moment we’re at “almost nothing”.

Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me.

Why not? I don't think skipping one week and a half of school when you're 8 will have any real effect in your life neither in the short or long term future. Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage.

> one week and a half of school when you're 8

I think you're vastly underestimating how often kids exhibit symptoms potentially consistent with Covid during a school year.

How often do they exhibit symptoms AND trigger a PCR test?

Oh sure. I think we're interpreting the parent comments differently (i.e., I'm understanding sokoloff's and aflag's comments to be about more general precautionary isolation based on symptomatic illness, not necessarily PCR-confirmed infection like logifail's kid.)

I was not really suggesting kids should be isolated whenever they have any sort of possible symptoms. But if you're diagnosed with some contagious illness, it's probably not a bad idea to try to curb the spread.

> if you're diagnosed with some contagious illness, it's probably not a bad idea to try to curb the spread

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?

Sure. If your kid is testing positive for a contagious diseases which killed over 6 million people worldwide and left many with long lasting effects, wouldn't common sense dictate that they should stay at home?

PCR testing, as applied in the current COVID testing protocols, is not an appropriate tool to approximate contagiousness. It reliably tells of prior exposure, that's all.

People who recovered from C19 many weeks ago and are no longer contagious can still test positive on a PCR test.

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.

Testing positive months after does happen, but is extremely rare, and yes, missing few days of school/work is not that big of a deal considering risks involved.

PCR test amplifies whatever was swabbed, usually from the nose (an air filter). A positive result does not prove there is an infection.

Our state-run testing facility always did PCR tests using a throat swab, and since I was the one who drew the short straw and took each of our kids there for mandatory tests, I've observed this being done a couple of dozen times over the last three years.

> People who recovered from C19 many weeks ago and are no longer contagious can still test positive on a PCR test

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.

I think kids are likely to catch asymptomatic or extremely mild Covid annually. That’ll potentially be 4-5% of their educational time.

Kids of wealthy families with parents with flexible jobs will be fine. Not every kid is in a home situation like that.

You have to look at both sides of the intervention, right?

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.

> 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.

A series of well administered rapid antigen tests is more useful than PCR.

Just waiting a couple days after symptoms abate is also going to bring most of the benefit of testing for clearance.

Assuming a 180 day school year (which would actually mean a 10 day period would be closer to 3-4% not 4-5%), that means that half of the year they are not in school anyway. So they have a good chance of catching it outside of school days anyway even if they catch it annually. Besides that, if that's that's a huge and consistent problem, school could just reduce the number of holidays by a week or so. The variance of number of school days throughout the world is already larger than that.

You cannot believe that <3 mo of summer accounts for half of the calendar year, and I know you know that 10d isolation runs past the weekend

There's 104 non school days regardless of any other days without school. It only takes 76 other days off (June 15-august 15 + 3 additional weeks off) is youe 180 days off.

Your analysis skipped the fact that quarantine, being 10d, necessarily extends past the weekend making those days unfit for your calculation's purpose

I was considering: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_14.asp

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.

> Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage.

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?

Probably not. It's likely there are worse diseases out there that we just don't check and keep our normal lives being carriers. But once you know, it's probably better to avoid. I think questioning whether or not doing a pcr test is good use of resources. But I don't think skipping school for a few days is where the problem resides.

Should they still punish parents for truancy?

I know it seems cruel but if you are immunocompromised that is your problem, don't make it everyone elses.

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.

> Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me.

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.

> Example had COVID, not a one-day mild illness

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

Tested positive for COVID

I'm not sure what point you're making there. COVID is the disease. SARS-CoV2 is the pathogen. That patient's individual experience is their illness.

I think it's clear to most what is meant by "tested positive for COVID"

Allowing a single covid-positive kid go to school means contaminating a significant portion of the class's students and students' parents. Ten days out of school sounds fine. Long covid is a thing; being unlikely to die does not mean that illness is unlikely to be life-altering.

> Allowing a single covid-positive kid go to school means contaminating a significant portion of the class's students and students' parents

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!"

Being immunocompromised, what sort of measures do you take when leaving your home? Just curious about how that impacts lifestyle.

> Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice.

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.

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