Over 70% of US household Covid spread started with a child
cidrap.umn.edu
cidrap.umn.edu
(https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/16649160363518525...)
> It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first and then an adult in the house 1 to 7 days later, then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult.
This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission. It's possible that parents had a fever, but didn't bother to check themselves until after their kid developed a fever and they checked them.
The paper does not even test a single participant for covid, so the fever might not represent covid at all. Nor does it check for other contacts the adult or kid may have had outside the house
Additionally, the sample is self-selected: it consists of people who opt into a fever reporting app -- not representative of the population as a whole.
The result is at odds with more careful contact tracing studies, like the Icelandic study from early 2020, which concludes the opposite. The paper is not a reliable guide to the relative risk that kids pose for disease spreading.
More broadly, the paper has no policy import. Would closing schools have protected anyone from getting covid? The evidence from studies comparing places that closed them vs. places that opened them suggests no. I
That closing schools is bad for the health of children is out of the scope of the ideas considered by this study.
It's plainly true that "focused protection" is a euphemism for letting the virus tear through the vast, the vast majority of the population.
The plan specifically is to (somehow) isolate vulnerable people and only "let er rip" for the rest of us. I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.
But yes, the loudest dissenters seemed to be contrarians, rather than people with a specific plan. They take a big mash of GBD, "lol it's not that bad, not everybody's going to get it", "lol everybody's going to get it so there's nothing we can do anyway", "we're not obligated to look out for other people anyway", etc etc with all the inherent contradictions. Any signal that went against "THE COVID NARRATIVE" they signal boosted.
Something like insecurity must have been driving this stuff. I think some of the counter-maintstream points were right, particularly about being sober about tradeoffs, but overall it was a total embarrassment. Granted the other side wasn't much better.
I don't see piles of dead people in florida, do you? Guess what went down in florida worked just as well as the most hardcore lockdown regions around. Almost like masks and lockdowns didn't do a damn thing at all. Who would have guessed?
These countries are very diverse in many respects, so one can't claim that they only succeeded due to some particular quirk they share in common: China, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, and others.
The only thing we really learned, at least in the USA, is what happens when you basically do nothing society-wide in the face of a pandemic. Outside of a few major metro areas, the country was just like Florida. Business closures on paper but not enforced, weak stay-at-home suggestions that were largely ignored, voluntary travel restrictions that were similarly ignored and unenforced.
The school closures were the one major exception, where at least briefly, actual collective, coordinated action happened.
But, for all the protesting about how GBD would have failed the old and vulnerable, it missed the point that we actually already did fail the old and vulnerable.
It’s argued as if we succeeded.
But for all our efforts, we failed those that really did need protection. They were stuck. (And some still are.) Community transmission rates were really high. And that matters when you’re in a vulnerable group, because anything >0 is basically “high”.
All our efforts were general protection, which helped groups that didn’t really need help, but didn’t help the groups that really needed it.
Allowing virtually the entire population to become infected before the advent of vaccines would have been devastating. Things were bad enough as it was, with 1 million deaths in the US alone. At least most people in the US were vaccinated before their first infection - things would have been that much worse if the US had fully followed Bhattacharya's advice and actively sought herd immunity in mid-2020.
Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it?
Of course, but one problem with scientific critiques like this is that they are written towards laymen (this is on Twitter) who probably don’t have the understanding of whether a critique is reasonable or not. So the identity of the person who is performing the critique does have value in that context. In a true peer review scenario it shouldn’t be that way, scientific critiques should be evaluated on their merits alone.
The biggest flaw with this plan was that you can get infected with the now large family of viruses grouped into "covid" more than once. People don't actually build up as much immunity as the declaration presumes. The second biggest flaw was that there is zero chance you could protect only the high-risk populations.
In the US the plan ended up being basically this but s/virus/vaccine/ because the vaccine gave stronger guarantees on avoiding transmission to high-risk groups but then that got weirdly political for some reason. If it was smallpox I bet those same people would have been breaking down the door for an "experimental" vaccine.
https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
The mRNA vaccines used in the USA are very effective at preventing severe symptoms. However they have only limited and temporary benefit in reducing transmission.
From the actual Great Barrington Declaration. Much different than "let it rip through the entire population."
Also GBD pretends mortality is the only worthy metric. There's such a thing as morbidity as the millions of people with Long COVID would like to discuss.
But Bhattacharya and friends with strong connection to Hoover Inst have a particularly nice revisionist view of their early work:
* Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on.
* Write seroprevalence papers with suspect specificity (changed between v1 and v2 of pre-print due to outrage from stat experts) that don't describe how the visual tests were interpreted, why they differ from the CZI BioHub paper's measurement of the Premiere test, or why a pathologist running ELISA tests to verify wanted off the paper.
* Stand by while friends like Scott Atlas make a media tour saying the seroprevalence paper suggests as many as 10,000 dead from COVID. Thus a fair portion of our population decides COVID is just the flu, and some of the GBD supporters still think it's "just a cold" despite the incredible evidence we have that it's much much worse (for example, see Iwasaki's work) and there's the little matter of over 1 million Americans dead.
* Then write the GBD before we have the vaccine or have any real public effort to try to protect the elderly.
On the bright side, Bhattacharya has been a proponent of the vax and many people (including me) agreed that targeted protection of elderly was very important. It's just that the revisionist commentary from his supporters is they were the only ones saying it. Completely false.
> Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
Go to https://ourworldindata.org/ and check Sweden vs Norway, Finland through the vaccine rollout.
https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-covid
https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-cumulative
10x the death rate is a huge difference. You’d be seeing mass death, far more than anywhere else. It would be extremely visible.
Every ounce of data generated for covid was highly politically motivated and extremely biased. It should all be taken with a huge grain of salt.
When I talk with GBD proponents it always boils down to this: they won't believe the data and make up a variety of reasons why not to trust it, then they turn around and trust far worse analyses like the article comparing Sweden and non-Nordic countries with much worse obesity and far different systems (like the article comparing Sweden vs other EU).
It takes immense privilege and a very sheltered life to think covid was the only thing worthy of focus. There is a balance to be had when treating a disease.
People needed to take off their blinders and see what damage their mitigations causes.
Andy point still stands. 10x the “death rate” is massive and would be very visible. It wasn’t. It was only visible if you looked at it with a microscope.
What society did to attempt to mitigate covid was a disaster no matter how well it worked. And the kicker is it didn’t work at all… which is probably why every pandemic plan said explicitly not to do masks and lockdowns and school closures.
Speaking of myopic, please do talk to the families of the ~1200 additional deaths per million people in Sweden and tell them their tragedy was "only visible if you looked at it with a microscope."
At least for America, the 3 Covid vaccines all failed to show any actual evidence of protection or immunity, even though the FDA grant an emergency use and later approval.
I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot). It would've probably been better if they never existed since people were fired to take useless experimental medical drugs with no proven positive effects.
The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.
You must be explicitly ignoring a ton of papers and data showing the opposite. The death rate of unvaxxed vs vaxxed is incredibly higher and CDC has data for it.
"I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot)."
In early 2021, the US had the largest vaccination campaign ever peaking at about 3.5 million shots per day in mid-April. Do you know what happened to the death rate (excess mortality) in 2021 through June? It dropped substantially. Isn't it odd to you that mass vaccination using a "clot shot" somehow drops the death rate substantially? It's rhetorical because to form the opinions you have, you must go out of your way to cherry pick papers and ignore data (or have conspiracy theories that data contradicting your opinion is fake).
Would you mind sharing at a high level what research led you to this conclusion?
> The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.
Ah.
They only were able to go on "FOX" because the left media's mind was already made up. Going against the narrative was absolutely forbidden.
I can't believe people still honestly believe anything "the experts" told them at this point. It takes massive privilege and echo-chamerism to look back over the last three years and still believe what "the experts" told them.
You don’t get to take the conclusion that someone has reached as a basis for dismissing the reasoning that led them there.
If you dared to question “the experts” and their idiotic plans you were immediately tossed into the alt-right wacko bucket. Didn’t matter what your credentials were or anything. Only doomsday “experts” were allowed a voice.
To this day I still can’t believe how many people went along with that crap for almost three years.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...
(Whether or not the idea is, in fact, stupid is not my point - rather, you choose to read a culture war into it but there are other ways to read it.)
We are left to deduce this is a knee-jerk "wrong team" response.
> During the live broadcast, Bhattacharya said it was “an absolute honor” to work with Desantis and praised what he described as DeSantis’ abilities to make decisions on COVID-19-related issues despite criticism. He expressed support for DeSantis’ rolling back certain pandemic-induced restrictions, including school closures, saying, “Governor, you did the right thing when you opened the schools.”
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article27487670...
> From March 2020, when the pandemic began, through March 22, 2023, Florida recorded 7,542,869 COVID-19 cases and 87,141 deaths, the 12th highest rate in cases and deaths per 100,000 people among the 50 states and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.
I'll be honest, if Jay Battacharya thinks Florida did a great job handling covid, i'm not sure i trust his judgement!
With that in mind, I can't find a link to back up the claim about age-adjusted death rate ranking. I thought I saw one before. I found this one that goes by year:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...
Looks like they did badly in 2021 and well in 2020. Ideally I'd want to look across all years, since that's the "when it's all said and done" question.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
1: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-age-...
Lots of other people got COVID, and some of them became seriously ill or died (mostly over 50). But the supermajority of Americans who died were over 65.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
- my statistics professor
What did she mean? That if the impact of a treatment is so difficult to discern that you're looking at some statistic to judge it the treatment probably is not effective.
The fact that Sweden doesn't stand out as a horror show relative to everyone else is indicative, as well as places with strict enforcement of lockdown rules. Nobody stands out
https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-covid
https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-cumulative
If you only look at the first year of the `sweden-vs-nordic-covid` link it looks pretty bad for Sweden, but if you extend it out, Finland and Norway traded early reduced mortality for later increased mortality.
This suggests Covid is highly transmissible, and restrictive policies just shift mortality out a little bit, not reduce it. Sure it's great to save lives, but at what cost to society? You need to balance mental health, the needs of children for social and educational development, and the economy.
You can't stop the world because people who are old or very sick are dying, that's nature, we're all subject to the same rules. You always need to balance the societal harm potential against the benefit, and with Covid our leaders seem to have forgotten that in many places.
Extend the timeline out as much as you want. Sweden still has a lot more cumulative dead per capita. And you are simply lying that Norway had increased fatalities and so just shifted it in time. The gap between Sweden and Norway slightly increased by May 2023.
Spare me your opinions and standard talking points after seeing data contradicting Sweden was some shining star of stellar policies due to GBD principles. A lot of our "leaders" like DeSantis forgot that pretending your expert in things you know nothing about and finding the most partisan hack doc you can for Surgeon General doesn't mean you're making correct decisions.
We could also talk about morbidity but that would make your weak argument even worse. After all, quality of life is SO important during the limited lockdown times but let's not measure significant decreased qualify of life for millions of Americans from Long COVID. And lets all hope there isn't significant subclinical issues like increased thromboembolic activity (frequently seen post-COVID) that will rear its head later.
New York got hit early and hard, having a large number of deaths in the first 2-3 months before anyone knew how to deal with COVID. After that New York did better than average.
Florida got through the first 2-3 months fine, with about the same low number of deaths that California and Washington had. Handled well they could have stayed like that, but instead they started having a higher than average death rate and closing the gap with New York in total deaths.
Florida's highest death rates were during the delta wave, which was after vaccines were widely available. The vaccine was very effective at preventing death from delta, which is why California and Washington had slight upturns in the death rate at that time as opposed to the steep rise in Florida.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
The video discusses vaccination policy, mask mandates, school reopenings, and death rates. The TLDR is that policies that different governments enacted did not seem to have much impact on death rates, and that therefore what was given up (in terms of closed schools/businesses/etc.) was somewhat in vain. I think he should have spent a little time on non-death impacts, such as long COVID, which seem to be more prevalent in people who got COVID pre-vaccine.
Even as somebody who frequently shakes his head at Florida, they really didn't do significantly worse in a way you could pin on the governer's policies. The entire covid cycle was a learning process and people frequently made useless comparisons, such as rank-ordering states that have very different demographics.
Let's all be intellectually honest here and push back on some of the common post-COVID tropes.
According to the science and data, Florida did no better or worse than basically anywhere else. I dunno what else to say. Y'all got lied to.
> This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission.
do you think that skews statistics worse than declaring a person died of covid when they only died with covid, and launching a disciplinary investigation of the license of a senior physician who pointed out that there is a checkbox on the death certificate for exactly this declaration? When coupled with a 5 figure dollar bonus to the hospital for the number of "of covids" they came up with?
but anyway, you think that so many more children caught it from their parents than from their peers AND the timing of the temperature measurements was always skewed in the wrong direction, that the errors don't wash, and that the researchers aren't as good at considering this as you are?
- Kids are younger than average so they have less exposure-based immunity
- Kids have higher-degree more-connected physical proximity graphs than adults, they're usually in classes with a group of 20-30-ish other kids. Multiply that by a factor of 5 or more if they switch classes over 6-10 periods. Then they get on a school bus with yet another group of kids.
- Kids (especially young ones) don't always keep the same social boundaries as adults, more likely to sneeze / cough on each other, share food / plates, etc.
it's baffling how cocksure you are. We don't know and if anyone claims they do with a good accuracy theyre full of it.
You should be surprised, it was and still is a novel virus. We didnt know and still don't know the long term effects since we don't have enough data to make a long term analysis. Get your head out your ass this kind of thinking led to bad government decisions by afraid citizens that enabled their governments to make poor decisions
Did adults do better than children against SARS-Cov-2 immunity-wise? I would agree in general but I was under the impression that SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus nobody / few people were immune to.
Or did some people have for some reason an immune system prepared against SARS-Cov-2? How? Were there viruses similar enough before?
...and I'm someone who likes kids.
I realize tests can have false negatives, but I would have expected that we parents would have also gotten sick, and that our symptoms would be notable enough for us to know if we'd had COVID. On the "anecdote" versus "data" spectrum, this is somewhere in the middle; on the one hand, it's just one family, but on the other hand, this has held up for multiple years.
Is that accurate? One of the main stated reasons for school closures was to prevent spread from kids to older household members and teachers.
Anything becomes controversial when you apply enough motivated reasoning to it.
Who gives a shit about covid when you need to work for a living. Who gives a shit about covid when your kids literally depend on schools for healthy meals, safety and learning.
The myopic focus that work from home tech workers have on covid is so utterly detached from reality. The idea that all we should have optimized for is the spread of some respiratory virus. It’s insane. I still cannot believe the amount of privilege it takes to dismiss kids going to school.
So the people living paycheck-to-paycheck should just continue business as usual and their families will be the ones dying during the pandemic, because they've got way bigger problems, got it.
2. What we did do in response to Covid will instead financially, educationally, and socially cripple those who already were living paycheck-to-paycheck, and make sure they stay that way for a long time.
3. So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
Once you realize most of the people in favor of those mitigations fall into this bucket… it kinda starts to make sense. There is a reason so many in the laptop class supported this crap. They directly benifited from it.
COVID killed 19k people 30-39 which is 6% excess deaths, killed 46k people 40-49 which is 10% excess deaths and 201k people 50-64 which is 11% excess deaths.
The Vietnam war killed 58,000 Americans.
> 3. So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
If they were doing that, yes. (And I can't understand how you'd think this would be some kind of 'gotcha' or that I wouldn't consider that actually worse).
The scientific community wasn't focused on that, political pundits were focused on that. Specifically, by shouting loudly and repeatedly that because children aren't dying from COVID, we should keep schools open.
Those pundits never had a good answer for 'But while the children aren't dying/getting seriously sick from COVID, what about their parents/grandparents/etc?'
Curious as to what is going on with your food delivery handoffs that make them a vector for spread. Do you shake hands and hug your delivery person?
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/report-covid-19-vaccines...
>Typical white Americans
This is pathetic
Your characterization of this as "hypochondriac" fear is almost unconscionable.
We might as well blame all the fat people as well. If they were thinner we’d have saved lives.
Since COVID spreads well in all sorts of environments, whether or not school spread was controlled or not would matter less since it would still spread. And while parts of the US did have some pretty strict school closures for quite a while, other things being much less restricted might have meant the spread (or lack thereof) in schools didn't matter much since it was still spreading everywhere else. Whatever one might think of school closing as a policy, arguably the weirdest thing was that even in parts of the US that had more COVID restrictions in general, school closings were a uniquely restrictive outlier while everything else was relaxed. As was pointed out at the time, adults could go to packed bars far earlier than students could go to school. Even if school closings were worth it to control the spread, only closing schools seems like a questionable strategy.
Every teacher I know wants to educate their kids. They wanted to do so without putting their lives at risk, which is a reasonable thing to ask.
Schools closed because of a shelter-in-place order from the CDC. Fed was out of options after calling it a hoax during 2019 instead of preparing. There should have been a plan to reopen schools before the CDC’s “14 days”.
Me and my wife would rarely get sick before kids, and even then before they started school
Once they started going to daycare, then preschool, or when switching schools… we all get sick at home now
Written from my back porch as the two children scream at each other inside.
Both of which are reasonable assumptions for most people, but it would be great if more people didn't have those assumptions work for them.
My doctor told me that being metabolically unhealthy weakens immune system and excersing and eating healthy will protect from frequent infections.
I don't know what to make of this.
As you are aware, it is kind of a rude question, but also a weird one
Not sure why you’d ask that given my anecdote
Pretty much all parents I know describe the same situation of not getting sick very often before kids, and that completely changing once their kids start going to daycare/school
> As you are aware, it is kind of a rude question, but also a weird one
The (US) media drilled into us for years that being overweight/obese may as well be a covid death sentence, doing things like stating how many covid hospitalizations/deaths were overweight/obese without context. So it's become very easy for people to jump on that.
The missing context was that if you actually compared like-for-like, using the real rates in the general US population... overweight/obesity has (almost) no effect. They just left that part out so the number sounded high, or compared "obese" in the population to "overweight or obese" in hospitalizations.
do you have any reference to this by any chance? I want to search for this but wasn't sure what ' like -for-like' means in this context.
> 78% of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the US overweight or obese, CDC finds
> Among 71,491 U.S. adults who were hospitalized with COVID-19, 27.8 percent were overweight and 50.2 were obese, according to the CDC's latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published March 8.
And here's the population statistics (which you'll note aren't in the reporting above): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm
> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 41.9% (2017-March 2020)
> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)
It's not no effect at all, but the effect is pretty small. It definitely doesn't deserve as much attention as it's gotten, especially relative to other risks like age. I think I vaguely remember diabetes was another risk factor barely talked about that has a higher effect than weight.
---
> but wasn't sure what ' like -for-like' means in this context
Some of the reporting would include the population context, but would say "78% of hospitalized patients were overweight or obese" and compare it directly to "41% of the US population is obese". It's technically correct but extremely misleading, since the reader will compare those two numbers directly even though they're not the same thing.
Sorry didn't mean to offend. I have prediabtes and dr told me that it could lower my immunity. That was his response when i asked him if there is anything i could do to stop getting sick.
> No one in my family is overweight or has any sort of health issues
same here. I am not obese or have any visible health issues but have high fasting glucose and prediabetes a1c. Even prediabetes can impair the immune system.
This doesn't contradict your anecdote though. Its totally possible that you and your friends are getting more sick now given increased exposure and high rates of prediabetes in the country ( 41% of men , 1/3 overall population)
Wasn’t really offended, just confused about where your were coming from
Your explanation makes a lot of sense and provides a good reference for others who could be wondering about it in the same line
Do not miss those years. And in fact I wonder how much of a toll the constant virus fighting had on me (combined with poor sleep and generally getting older, etc.)
4x Moderna.
Symptoms were sore throat, persistent cough, mild fever and sweats. No loss of taste or smell.
Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, I’m not complaining at all about my vaccine assisted recovery. I’m also immune compromised (in the last 6 months) and fairly happy with how well things worked out. I didn’t really even need to take time off and went to (remote) meetings. Covid was nothing compared to some bad drug interactions I had a few months prior.
I thought not losing any sense of smell or taste was most interesting and it was likely due to some combination of the specific variant, the Moderna vaccines and paxlovid that prevented that class of symptoms.
Depending on age and health, it really makes it difficult to say if getting vaxxed was the “smart” move when weighing the risk of contraction vs the unknowns of any potential side effects.
Per the CDC:
> 146.6 Million Estimated Total Infections > 7.5 Million Estimated Hospitalizations > 921,000 Estimated Total Deaths
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
If memory serves, most of the panic in the early stages was really about the risk of overloading hospitals (which mostly didn't happen) and a lack of ventilators (which it turned out that ventilators made things worse for most COVID patients). COVID-19 itself wasn't extremely lethal at any point.
On a population level, it's the most lethal virus in the last 100 years. A virus that infects everyone and that kills 0.5-1% of those it infects is almost a worst-case scenario for public health.
Policy makers want really badly to justify what they did to kids during the pandemic, but even with this report's poor methodology, the data just doesn't back up the narrative that kids were "killing grandma" by bringing covid home from school.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...
No the author is not some homicidal maniac. In interviews he emphasizes that no policy should be made based on his findings. But if policy were made, he would focus on universal healthcare, pre-school, government funded maternal leave, etc to support women.
Ah, remember the headlines when Trump was taking it more seriously than the press, and the press was comparing it to the flu and Pelosi in Chinatown SF saying don't be racist, come on down.
It was much worse than the flu if you were over 65; it was predominantly a pandemic of the elderly and ill, but gotta sell the poke and boosters to the tune of $40B per round. I had to argue the efficacy of natural immunity from having had it to keep from getting vaccinated for work, and yet they forced my older kids and nephew to get booster after booster if they wanted to continue to attend university. My nephew immediately had chest pains within 8 hours of the vaccination, and he was diagnosed with myocarditis, and is still being checked for heart issues. He was a runner and did not have any of the comorbidities to push him to get the vax given he had already had COVID and should not have been advised to get vaccinated. They did a great job of memory holing natural immunity the CDC and Fauci and Co.
Maybe regulate very good air quality and/or air purifiers in daycare and school buildings. Something along the lines, CO2 not allowed to go over 800 ppm, and at least 6 air changes per hour for every room.
End of 2022, Belgium made a new law about indoors air quality https://www.health.belgium.be/en/closer-legal-framework-indo...
Daughter came home from school with a note telling us that a kid at the school had spent 3 days in class with a positive test, but the parents sent her anyway because they had nobody to watch her and because kids didn't "have bad reactions."
A few days later, I noticed that I lost all sense of smell and I've had long covid ever since. I miss being able to enjoy citrus and peppers and days where I'm not completely exhausted by 5pm.
I might put two and two together at this point and do something about it were I ill with long covid and "completely exhausted by 5pm". But since I am exposed to IVM every now and then (treating cattle) I'll likely never know!8-))
It’s almost criminal abuse to force kids to wear masks for something they aren’t even at risk for.
You are free to force your kids to hide their face and treat others as nothing more than disease vectors… but pre-2020 most would rightly consider that child abuse.
> Smart Thermometer–Based Participatory Surveillance to Discern the Role of Children in Household Viral Transmission During the COVID-19 Pandemic
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Additionally, the methodology is questionable, but the conflict of interest/CDC funding is even more so. Especially if participatory surveillance becomes mandatory in a future pandemic with these types of studies trying to back common sense.
> Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Ms Bloch reported employment with stock options at Kinsa Inc during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.
"Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Ms Bloch reported employment with stock options at Kinsa Inc during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported."
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/gone-but-not-forg...
[1] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=natio...
Fast spreading viruses have careless, often coughing, sneezing, unhygienic kids as infection centers. But I still dont think it was a good idea to close schools, we saved possibly few additional grannies or other frail people, but fucked up non-trivial amount of kids for life. Many grandmas worth their salt would gladly take the extra risk given the options
I doubt it was fully sterilized between uses.
If so, is the problem overcrowding, the design of the buildings (e.g., no windows can open per Clinton-era energy saving policies,) or something else?
They kind of incoherently try to explain away this, but it seems to run directly counter to their basic thesis. I mean, everyone who has worked in daycare or grade school knows that kids can get each other sick, so it would be surprising if it were different for covid-19, but this seems like the a significant issue with their data that is the more interesting finding, and they sort of shrug it off.
I may be a bit biased because I live in Texas, and we actually had the highest covid-19 rates when it was hottest, i.e. when schools were not in session, just like most of the Sun Belt.