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And we still only have 31 confirmed death by Covid19 on children under 14 years. > https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S

by eiji 6y ago

And we still only have 31 confirmed death by Covid19 on children under 14 years. > https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...

Krasnol 6y ago
What do you want to imply by that? "Only" is quite cruel btw considering that those kids will never grow up to have a life and how many other people sick kids infect and probably kill.
- ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
  >What do you want to imply by that? That the death rate for children is incredibly low.
  - Krasnol 6y ago
    This is not what he/she wanted to imply. This is what was written there.
VikingCoder 6y ago
And we have no idea what the long-term impacts of Covid-19 might be. Just as a for-instance, I had the Chickenpox, like most people my age. No biggie. Then I later developed Shingles, because the Chickenpox virus can be dormant in your body for decades. Shingles can be debilitating. I highly doubt that Covid-19 will have long-term health impacts like that for children. But we absolutely don't know for sure, yet.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Chickenpox is a retrovirus, which is why it can linger in your body for decades, as it transcribes itself into selected portions of your genome to hide and then later re-emerge. SARS-CoV-2 is not a retrovirus.
  - namibj 6y ago
    Right, but it likes to hide out in rather remote areas of your body.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      > Right, but it likes to hide out in rather remote areas of your body Covid “hangs out” in your body? I have not heard this, is there any source you can link?
      - namibj 6y ago
        I must have been confused, or the presumed information source I remembered is much harder to find than expected. The issue isn't the virus lingering, it's apparently blood clots throughout various organs, which can cause problems years after they come to be. A friend of my family died from unexpected bleeding/brain crushing after a small blood vessel in his brain popped. This was many months after the issue was first noticed, and a few months after one of to-be-two operations was done to prevent that clogged blood vessel from bursting due to over-pressure.
  - obloid 6y ago
    Varicella-zoster virus (chickenpox/shingles), while it does create latent infections, is not a retrovirus. Retroviruses like HIV actually insert a copy of the viral genome into the host cell's DNA. VZV and other herpesviruses have a different latency mechanism[1] than retroviruses. SARS-CoV-2 probably does not cause latent infections, but could potentially cause a chronic infection similar to other RNA viruses like Hepatitis C. I would suspect it probably doesn't, but it is certainly possible. 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118253/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118253/
    - at_a_remove 6y ago
      How odd, this is not what I was taught decades back. I suppose I will have to refresh. This is like finding out that Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, despite that being in textbooks forever.
- creaghpatr 6y ago
  Anything could happen!
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  This is such an empty argument. Name me a coronavirus that has ever exhibited these mysterious long term impacts everyone is blindly conjecturing. Even SARS-1, which is way more serious than SARS-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), doesn’t cause long term damage (lungs, etc) in actual adults. What we should be concerned about is the long term impacts of poor socialization, weakened immune systems due to suppression of natural pathogen exchange, an environment of fear and hysteria, widened educational attainment gaps due to non-scientifically-grounded refusal to allow in-person instruction etc. Virtually all the uncertainty is on the “pro lockdown” side IMO. BTW I recognize you weren’t saying that long term damage does happen but rather that we just don’t know. But I reject that entire argument. We have no evidence it happens and plenty of evidence it doesn’t happen with more serious viruses.
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    There is a growing body of evidence of longer term effects in adults. Obviously the picture is still developing because this is a novel coronavirus, but I think there is plenty of reason to be very concerned. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-coronavirus-longterm-symptoms-months/612679/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      It's technically true that it's a novel coronavirus, but functionally it is incredibly similar to SARS-1 (what we used to just call SARS). SARS-1 is much more deadly and much more symptomatic. But structurally they resemble each other; they share the characteristic spike protein and a bunch of other features. Immunity to SARS-1 confers immunity to SARS-2. Now, SARS-1 being a more severe version of SARS-2, serves as a great model of what severe COVID-19 might look like. And we know that in SARS-1, there are not these supposed long-term effects. You can get lung damage that lasts for a few months, but is undetectable at the 1 year mark. That's not long-term damage. I also want to mention that the "long-hauler" narrative does not have real evidence behind it, except for those who are immunocompromised and therefore would be a "long-hauler" for literally any virus they got infected with. Unfortunately, and I am worried that saying this will trigger reflexive downvotes, almost all US mainstream media has an incredible leftist bias (see: recent events in the NYT, WaPo etc). Therefore anything coming from the atlantic, vox, CNN, is very transparently trying to perpetuate the "doom" narrative. That's why they don't report on any of the incredibly positive/surprising facts, such as the widespread T-cell cross-reactivity in those who have never been exposed to either SARS-1 or SARS-2, or the fact that children surprisingly don't seem to spread it to adults in any real numbers, or the logical conclusion of the fact that SARS-2 kills the very old but not the very young, which is that recurring deaths (deaths in subsequent years) from COVID-19 will be virtually nonexistent. --- Back to the long-term effects. The article you linked is not scientific at all and just rattles off a serious of anecdotes. So I don't really know what there is for me to argue against. There was a great study of SARS-1 lung imaging that I love to cite, and yet I can't find where my notes on it are. So take this random one I just came across: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843.2003.00522.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843... > Lung function studies carried out on 258 patients from Xiaotangshan Hospital in Beijing 2 months after discharge showed that 21% patients (54 of 258 patients) had evidence of impaired diffusion (DLCO < 80%pred) while 6% (16 of 258 patients) had restrictive ventilatory defect (VC < 80%pred).18 Fifty‐one of 54 patients had lung function tests repeated one month later. DLCO was found to improve in 80.4% patients (41 of 51 patients), and FVC in 81.3% patients (13 of 16 patients) (Table 3). These findings suggest that lung function abnormality caused by SARS might improve spontaneously over time. (BTW, long-term damage and the "long-hauler" meme are technically referring to two different things) As a counter-point to myself, the following study identified abnormalities (although keep in mind abnormality doesn't mean it's necessarily a massive problem) at the 6 month mark: https://thorax.bmj.com/content/59/10/889.abstract https://thorax.bmj.com/content/59/10/889.abstract The study I'm looking for but can't find showed abnormalities at the 3 month mark but no abnormalities at the 1 year mark, so that study I just linked doesn't actually contradict my own expectations. Finally remember that we're using SARS-1 here as a model of what really bad SARS-2 looks like. For anyone who doesn't have invasive-ventilation-level COVID-19, the expectation that they might experience long term damage is completely unfounded.
jjuel 6y ago
That would be great if children under 14 then didn't have any interaction with anyone over the age of 14. So while it is good that kids are not dying at the same rate as others it doesn't mean they shouldn't be tested or doing the same things everyone else is to prevent the spread.
- tzs 6y ago
  It's kind of odd. People will get all upset over a report of a squirrel with bubonic plague, even though they never come anywhere near squirrels. Or they will hide because a raccoon walks through their yard in the daytime and they are afraid of rabies (even if they live in western Washington, where there has never been a known case of rabies in raccoons...). (The reason the raccoon is out in daytime is most likely that she has babies at home and needs to gather more food than she can with just her usual nocturnal foraging). But children...which we actually allow to get close to us, even going so far as letting them into our buildings and vehicles? Meh.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Plague and rabies are much more deadly diseases. Plague kills about 10% of victims with the best treatment, and rabies can be vaccinated against post-infection but is basically unsurvivable once symptoms start.
newacct583 6y ago
This meme just won't die. It's a pandemic. It doesn't matter whether any given individual is at risk directly, becuase everyone can get this. Everyone sick, whether they live or die, means more people sick. This conflation between individual risk and aggregate risk is just pathological at this point. It won't stop.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  What about the overwhelming body of evidence showing that specifically children rarely if ever infect adults with COVID-19? I expected children to be virtually incapable of dying from it, but learning the truth about spread was quite surprising to me.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    > What about the overwhelming body of evidence showing that specifically children rarely if ever infect adults with COVID-19? I don't know what you're citing. There are a few papers out there showing effects like this, there's certainly no "overwhelming" evidence of anything in a pandemic that's barely seven months old, be real. > but learning the truth about spread was quite surprising to me That phrasing freaks me out a bit. What, exactly, are you reading? This is science, that kind of certainty is a design smell.
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      s/truth/the current reality which is well-supported by the literature/ if it makes you happy. Don't read too much into the wording. As far as the overwhelming body of evidence, let's start with some weaker but still reasonable evidence: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbfde4a7899eb0d8ffdb57b09/covid-19-school-aged-children.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbf... > In conclusion, closure or not of schools had no measurable direct impact on the number of laboratory confirmed cases in school-aged children in Finland orSweden. The negative effects of closing schools must be weighed against the positive indirect effects it might have on the mitigation of the covid-19 pandemic. https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.21.2000903#html_fulltext https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E... Title: No evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school in Ireland, 2020 separator commenting unavailable > Children are thought to be vectors for transmission of many respiratory diseases including influenza [2]. It was assumed that this would be true for COVID-19 also. To date however, evidence of widespread paediatric transmission has failed to emerge > Among 1,001 child contacts of these six cases there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19. In the school setting, among 924 child contacts and 101 adult contacts identified, there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19. > In summary, examination of all Irish paediatric cases of COVID-19 attending school during the pre-symptomatic and symptomatic periods of infection (n = 3) identified no cases of onward transmission to other children or adults within the school and a variety of other settings. These included music lessons (woodwind instruments) and choir practice, both of which are high-risk activities for transmission. Furthermore, no onward transmission from the three identified adult cases to children was identified. > The only documented transmission that occurred from this cohort was between adults in a working environment outside school. Among 1,025 child and adult contacts of these six cases in the school setting there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the follow-up period. Follow-up period was at least one incubation period (14 days) from last contact with a case. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-2403_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-2403_article > Children are underrepresented in coronavirus disease (COVID-19) case numbers (1,2). Severity in most children is limited, and children do not seem to be major drivers of transmission (3,4). However, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infects children of all ages (1,3). Despite the high proportion of mild or asymptomatic infections (5), they should be considered as transmitters unless proven otherwise. ^ Note I included the "they should be considered as transmitters until included otherwise" to ward off accusations of cherry-picking --- Now, even if children did spread normally, I would still be against school closures, indeed I am against the policy of containment entirely because I view it as an infantile and ineffective policy that just leads to worsened all-cause mortality and likely worsened COVID-19 mortality over the medium-term. There is one last study that I am having trouble finding which was much stronger/more conclusive than the ones I linked above, but I'm having trouble finding it. Really need to organize these studies better. (I have a master list of studies w/ relevant tidbits but haven't done that for the children studies since it doesn't interest me as much, given we already know that children don't personally die from COVID-19 in any real numbers)
munificent 6y ago
Every time I see someone focus only on COVID deaths, I remember the millions of people infected by polio who "survived" but spent the rest of their lives crippled or in iron lungs. Not dying does not mean 100% OK.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  That effect does not happen with COVID-19. Most cases are asymptomatic, paucisymptomatic, or comparable to a cold in severity. Doubly so for children. There is no evidence of serious “long-term” harm in anybody. With severe COVID-19 - the kind that almost kills people - you might have a few months of non-permanent lung abnormalities. SARS-2 is not the scary virus it’s made out to be. It’s just not. It’s a poor killer and a great spreader. Exactly the type of virus we in the general population need to let pass through us.
  - VikingCoder 6y ago
    You sound authoritative, so I'll ask you to respond to something that seems on the face of it to be scary, "Hundreds of health-care workers lost their lives battling the coronavirus" https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/healthcare-workers-death-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/healthca... "The nation’s largest nurses union, National Nurses United, puts the total much higher: 939 fatalities among health-care workers, based on reports from its chapters around the country, social media and obituaries." Isn't that a lot? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/excess-deaths-during-covid-19/?arc404=true https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/exc... "Excess U.S. deaths hit estimated 37,100 in pandemic’s early days, far more than previously known" Isn't the fact that you can visibly SEE excess deaths, greater than previous years' trends, concerning? > It’s a poor killer and a great spreader. It's such a great spreader, that even though it's a poor killer, it's killed 140,000 in the US. Isn't that, you know, a lot?
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      No, 140,000 is not particularly a lot for a semi-novel virus, especially when you look at the populations dying from it (at least half of these deaths are people at death's door. That doesn't mean their lives don't matter, but it does mean that, it's not necessarily something unique about COVID-19 that killed them) You should know that the way we classify deaths is highly suspect, but my argument doesn't hinge on that so assume all the deaths are legit. > Isn't the fact that you can visibly SEE excess deaths, greater than previous years' trends, concerning? As for excess deaths, assuming those are COVID-19 deaths is foolish. More people die every year from cardiac events than have died thus far from COVID-19 (and likely that will still hold by the end of this year for an apples-to-apples comparison); it stands to reason that many of those deaths are from cardiovascular disease, amplified by the unprecedented suspension of elective surgeries and preventative care, not to mention how afraid of going to the hospital people are. BTW, go look at 2019 all-cause mortality compared to 2020 all-cause mortality. They're almost identical. So no, statistically this is not something super crazy. ^ Seriously, go actually look at that data. You will probably be shocked. I was. Likewise, hundreds of health-care workers losing their lives isn't very surprising. Although in general I don't like to 'rebut' news articles because they don't give much that's actually rebuttable. --- BTW, I've said this elsewhere but probably not on this thread yet: Given COVID-19 kills the very old and spares the very young, once it has passed through the population, deaths in subsequent years will be nearly non-existent. Why? Because the set of COVID-19-naive individuals (of those who can actually get infected, since many cannot due to cross reactivity) becomes dominated by new entrants to the world, e.g. babies/toddlers. The same individuals who are virtually incapable of dying from COVID-19. Therefore unlike Flu, which apart from its ability to mutate is responsible for significant recurring death, COVID-19 will not have significant recurring death. Thus amortized over many years, the numbers look even better than they do now. And I know this sounds hard to believe, but the numbers to me look really good. I believe our policy of lockdown has certainly increased all-cause mortality - I consider that inarguable - but furthermore, I think it is very likely that our policies have put our bodies into a state where we suffer worse outcomes from COVID-19. This is due to people staying inside and therefore not getting sun exposure, with vitamin d and to a much lesser extent nitric oxide playing INCREDIBLE roles in the outcomes of respiratory diseases (the magnitude of effect size shocked me w/ vitamin D), lack of exercise due to gym closures etc, social isolation which has been shown to increase death apart from the feeling of emotional loneliness (i.e. even if you take away peoples' emotional loneliness they still die more), lack of sleep and general life disruption attributable to unemployment and the "new normal", etc. I could go on, but really I should step away now before I spend hours in this thread...

by eiji 6y ago

Krasnol 6y ago

What do you want to imply by that? "Only" is quite cruel btw considering that those kids will never grow up to have a life and how many other people sick kids infect and probably kill.

ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
>What do you want to imply by that? That the death rate for children is incredibly low.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  This is not what he/she wanted to imply. This is what was written there.

VikingCoder 6y ago

And we have no idea what the long-term impacts of Covid-19 might be. Just as a for-instance, I had the Chickenpox, like most people my age. No biggie. Then I later developed Shingles, because the Chickenpox virus can be dormant in your body for decades. Shingles can be debilitating. I highly doubt that Covid-19 will have long-term health impacts like that for children. But we absolutely don't know for sure, yet.

at_a_remove 6y ago
Chickenpox is a retrovirus, which is why it can linger in your body for decades, as it transcribes itself into selected portions of your genome to hide and then later re-emerge. SARS-CoV-2 is not a retrovirus.
- namibj 6y ago
  Right, but it likes to hide out in rather remote areas of your body.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    > Right, but it likes to hide out in rather remote areas of your body Covid “hangs out” in your body? I have not heard this, is there any source you can link?
    - namibj 6y ago
      I must have been confused, or the presumed information source I remembered is much harder to find than expected. The issue isn't the virus lingering, it's apparently blood clots throughout various organs, which can cause problems years after they come to be. A friend of my family died from unexpected bleeding/brain crushing after a small blood vessel in his brain popped. This was many months after the issue was first noticed, and a few months after one of to-be-two operations was done to prevent that clogged blood vessel from bursting due to over-pressure.
- obloid 6y ago
  Varicella-zoster virus (chickenpox/shingles), while it does create latent infections, is not a retrovirus. Retroviruses like HIV actually insert a copy of the viral genome into the host cell's DNA. VZV and other herpesviruses have a different latency mechanism[1] than retroviruses. SARS-CoV-2 probably does not cause latent infections, but could potentially cause a chronic infection similar to other RNA viruses like Hepatitis C. I would suspect it probably doesn't, but it is certainly possible. 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118253/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118253/
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    How odd, this is not what I was taught decades back. I suppose I will have to refresh. This is like finding out that Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, despite that being in textbooks forever.
creaghpatr 6y ago
Anything could happen!
__blockcipher__ 6y ago
This is such an empty argument. Name me a coronavirus that has ever exhibited these mysterious long term impacts everyone is blindly conjecturing. Even SARS-1, which is way more serious than SARS-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), doesn’t cause long term damage (lungs, etc) in actual adults. What we should be concerned about is the long term impacts of poor socialization, weakened immune systems due to suppression of natural pathogen exchange, an environment of fear and hysteria, widened educational attainment gaps due to non-scientifically-grounded refusal to allow in-person instruction etc. Virtually all the uncertainty is on the “pro lockdown” side IMO. BTW I recognize you weren’t saying that long term damage does happen but rather that we just don’t know. But I reject that entire argument. We have no evidence it happens and plenty of evidence it doesn’t happen with more serious viruses.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  There is a growing body of evidence of longer term effects in adults. Obviously the picture is still developing because this is a novel coronavirus, but I think there is plenty of reason to be very concerned. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-coronavirus-longterm-symptoms-months/612679/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    It's technically true that it's a novel coronavirus, but functionally it is incredibly similar to SARS-1 (what we used to just call SARS). SARS-1 is much more deadly and much more symptomatic. But structurally they resemble each other; they share the characteristic spike protein and a bunch of other features. Immunity to SARS-1 confers immunity to SARS-2. Now, SARS-1 being a more severe version of SARS-2, serves as a great model of what severe COVID-19 might look like. And we know that in SARS-1, there are not these supposed long-term effects. You can get lung damage that lasts for a few months, but is undetectable at the 1 year mark. That's not long-term damage. I also want to mention that the "long-hauler" narrative does not have real evidence behind it, except for those who are immunocompromised and therefore would be a "long-hauler" for literally any virus they got infected with. Unfortunately, and I am worried that saying this will trigger reflexive downvotes, almost all US mainstream media has an incredible leftist bias (see: recent events in the NYT, WaPo etc). Therefore anything coming from the atlantic, vox, CNN, is very transparently trying to perpetuate the "doom" narrative. That's why they don't report on any of the incredibly positive/surprising facts, such as the widespread T-cell cross-reactivity in those who have never been exposed to either SARS-1 or SARS-2, or the fact that children surprisingly don't seem to spread it to adults in any real numbers, or the logical conclusion of the fact that SARS-2 kills the very old but not the very young, which is that recurring deaths (deaths in subsequent years) from COVID-19 will be virtually nonexistent. --- Back to the long-term effects. The article you linked is not scientific at all and just rattles off a serious of anecdotes. So I don't really know what there is for me to argue against. There was a great study of SARS-1 lung imaging that I love to cite, and yet I can't find where my notes on it are. So take this random one I just came across: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843.2003.00522.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843... > Lung function studies carried out on 258 patients from Xiaotangshan Hospital in Beijing 2 months after discharge showed that 21% patients (54 of 258 patients) had evidence of impaired diffusion (DLCO < 80%pred) while 6% (16 of 258 patients) had restrictive ventilatory defect (VC < 80%pred).18 Fifty‐one of 54 patients had lung function tests repeated one month later. DLCO was found to improve in 80.4% patients (41 of 51 patients), and FVC in 81.3% patients (13 of 16 patients) (Table 3). These findings suggest that lung function abnormality caused by SARS might improve spontaneously over time. (BTW, long-term damage and the "long-hauler" meme are technically referring to two different things) As a counter-point to myself, the following study identified abnormalities (although keep in mind abnormality doesn't mean it's necessarily a massive problem) at the 6 month mark: https://thorax.bmj.com/content/59/10/889.abstract https://thorax.bmj.com/content/59/10/889.abstract The study I'm looking for but can't find showed abnormalities at the 3 month mark but no abnormalities at the 1 year mark, so that study I just linked doesn't actually contradict my own expectations. Finally remember that we're using SARS-1 here as a model of what really bad SARS-2 looks like. For anyone who doesn't have invasive-ventilation-level COVID-19, the expectation that they might experience long term damage is completely unfounded.

jjuel 6y ago

That would be great if children under 14 then didn't have any interaction with anyone over the age of 14. So while it is good that kids are not dying at the same rate as others it doesn't mean they shouldn't be tested or doing the same things everyone else is to prevent the spread.

tzs 6y ago
It's kind of odd. People will get all upset over a report of a squirrel with bubonic plague, even though they never come anywhere near squirrels. Or they will hide because a raccoon walks through their yard in the daytime and they are afraid of rabies (even if they live in western Washington, where there has never been a known case of rabies in raccoons...). (The reason the raccoon is out in daytime is most likely that she has babies at home and needs to gather more food than she can with just her usual nocturnal foraging). But children...which we actually allow to get close to us, even going so far as letting them into our buildings and vehicles? Meh.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Plague and rabies are much more deadly diseases. Plague kills about 10% of victims with the best treatment, and rabies can be vaccinated against post-infection but is basically unsurvivable once symptoms start.

newacct583 6y ago

This meme just won't die. It's a pandemic. It doesn't matter whether any given individual is at risk directly, becuase everyone can get this. Everyone sick, whether they live or die, means more people sick. This conflation between individual risk and aggregate risk is just pathological at this point. It won't stop.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
What about the overwhelming body of evidence showing that specifically children rarely if ever infect adults with COVID-19? I expected children to be virtually incapable of dying from it, but learning the truth about spread was quite surprising to me.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > What about the overwhelming body of evidence showing that specifically children rarely if ever infect adults with COVID-19? I don't know what you're citing. There are a few papers out there showing effects like this, there's certainly no "overwhelming" evidence of anything in a pandemic that's barely seven months old, be real. > but learning the truth about spread was quite surprising to me That phrasing freaks me out a bit. What, exactly, are you reading? This is science, that kind of certainty is a design smell.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    s/truth/the current reality which is well-supported by the literature/ if it makes you happy. Don't read too much into the wording. As far as the overwhelming body of evidence, let's start with some weaker but still reasonable evidence: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbfde4a7899eb0d8ffdb57b09/covid-19-school-aged-children.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbf... > In conclusion, closure or not of schools had no measurable direct impact on the number of laboratory confirmed cases in school-aged children in Finland orSweden. The negative effects of closing schools must be weighed against the positive indirect effects it might have on the mitigation of the covid-19 pandemic. https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.21.2000903#html_fulltext https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E... Title: No evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school in Ireland, 2020 separator commenting unavailable > Children are thought to be vectors for transmission of many respiratory diseases including influenza [2]. It was assumed that this would be true for COVID-19 also. To date however, evidence of widespread paediatric transmission has failed to emerge > Among 1,001 child contacts of these six cases there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19. In the school setting, among 924 child contacts and 101 adult contacts identified, there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19. > In summary, examination of all Irish paediatric cases of COVID-19 attending school during the pre-symptomatic and symptomatic periods of infection (n = 3) identified no cases of onward transmission to other children or adults within the school and a variety of other settings. These included music lessons (woodwind instruments) and choir practice, both of which are high-risk activities for transmission. Furthermore, no onward transmission from the three identified adult cases to children was identified. > The only documented transmission that occurred from this cohort was between adults in a working environment outside school. Among 1,025 child and adult contacts of these six cases in the school setting there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the follow-up period. Follow-up period was at least one incubation period (14 days) from last contact with a case. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-2403_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-2403_article > Children are underrepresented in coronavirus disease (COVID-19) case numbers (1,2). Severity in most children is limited, and children do not seem to be major drivers of transmission (3,4). However, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infects children of all ages (1,3). Despite the high proportion of mild or asymptomatic infections (5), they should be considered as transmitters unless proven otherwise. ^ Note I included the "they should be considered as transmitters until included otherwise" to ward off accusations of cherry-picking --- Now, even if children did spread normally, I would still be against school closures, indeed I am against the policy of containment entirely because I view it as an infantile and ineffective policy that just leads to worsened all-cause mortality and likely worsened COVID-19 mortality over the medium-term. There is one last study that I am having trouble finding which was much stronger/more conclusive than the ones I linked above, but I'm having trouble finding it. Really need to organize these studies better. (I have a master list of studies w/ relevant tidbits but haven't done that for the children studies since it doesn't interest me as much, given we already know that children don't personally die from COVID-19 in any real numbers)

munificent 6y ago

Every time I see someone focus only on COVID deaths, I remember the millions of people infected by polio who "survived" but spent the rest of their lives crippled or in iron lungs. Not dying does not mean 100% OK.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
That effect does not happen with COVID-19. Most cases are asymptomatic, paucisymptomatic, or comparable to a cold in severity. Doubly so for children. There is no evidence of serious “long-term” harm in anybody. With severe COVID-19 - the kind that almost kills people - you might have a few months of non-permanent lung abnormalities. SARS-2 is not the scary virus it’s made out to be. It’s just not. It’s a poor killer and a great spreader. Exactly the type of virus we in the general population need to let pass through us.
- VikingCoder 6y ago
  You sound authoritative, so I'll ask you to respond to something that seems on the face of it to be scary, "Hundreds of health-care workers lost their lives battling the coronavirus" https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/healthcare-workers-death-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/healthca... "The nation’s largest nurses union, National Nurses United, puts the total much higher: 939 fatalities among health-care workers, based on reports from its chapters around the country, social media and obituaries." Isn't that a lot? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/excess-deaths-during-covid-19/?arc404=true https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/exc... "Excess U.S. deaths hit estimated 37,100 in pandemic’s early days, far more than previously known" Isn't the fact that you can visibly SEE excess deaths, greater than previous years' trends, concerning? > It’s a poor killer and a great spreader. It's such a great spreader, that even though it's a poor killer, it's killed 140,000 in the US. Isn't that, you know, a lot?
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    No, 140,000 is not particularly a lot for a semi-novel virus, especially when you look at the populations dying from it (at least half of these deaths are people at death's door. That doesn't mean their lives don't matter, but it does mean that, it's not necessarily something unique about COVID-19 that killed them) You should know that the way we classify deaths is highly suspect, but my argument doesn't hinge on that so assume all the deaths are legit. > Isn't the fact that you can visibly SEE excess deaths, greater than previous years' trends, concerning? As for excess deaths, assuming those are COVID-19 deaths is foolish. More people die every year from cardiac events than have died thus far from COVID-19 (and likely that will still hold by the end of this year for an apples-to-apples comparison); it stands to reason that many of those deaths are from cardiovascular disease, amplified by the unprecedented suspension of elective surgeries and preventative care, not to mention how afraid of going to the hospital people are. BTW, go look at 2019 all-cause mortality compared to 2020 all-cause mortality. They're almost identical. So no, statistically this is not something super crazy. ^ Seriously, go actually look at that data. You will probably be shocked. I was. Likewise, hundreds of health-care workers losing their lives isn't very surprising. Although in general I don't like to 'rebut' news articles because they don't give much that's actually rebuttable. --- BTW, I've said this elsewhere but probably not on this thread yet: Given COVID-19 kills the very old and spares the very young, once it has passed through the population, deaths in subsequent years will be nearly non-existent. Why? Because the set of COVID-19-naive individuals (of those who can actually get infected, since many cannot due to cross reactivity) becomes dominated by new entrants to the world, e.g. babies/toddlers. The same individuals who are virtually incapable of dying from COVID-19. Therefore unlike Flu, which apart from its ability to mutate is responsible for significant recurring death, COVID-19 will not have significant recurring death. Thus amortized over many years, the numbers look even better than they do now. And I know this sounds hard to believe, but the numbers to me look really good. I believe our policy of lockdown has certainly increased all-cause mortality - I consider that inarguable - but furthermore, I think it is very likely that our policies have put our bodies into a state where we suffer worse outcomes from COVID-19. This is due to people staying inside and therefore not getting sun exposure, with vitamin d and to a much lesser extent nitric oxide playing INCREDIBLE roles in the outcomes of respiratory diseases (the magnitude of effect size shocked me w/ vitamin D), lack of exercise due to gym closures etc, social isolation which has been shown to increase death apart from the feeling of emotional loneliness (i.e. even if you take away peoples' emotional loneliness they still die more), lack of sleep and general life disruption attributable to unemployment and the "new normal", etc. I could go on, but really I should step away now before I spend hours in this thread...