Any parent of school age children knows that almost every cold you catch comes from your kids, who spend their time at daycare passing around the same toy and each putting it in their mouth. A few come from the workplace, but most from kids. Covid is not a superflu, it’s a supercold, and there’s no a priori reason to expect that you can’t catch it from your kids.
Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
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Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#22If I read correctly the they're saying they found that children have higher viral loads in their respiratory tracts. They are then making a very logical leap to assuming that this means children will more easily spread the virus. Is it possible that this assumption could be wrong? Are there no studies on the actual transmission rates from children to others vs that from adults?
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#23This study does not prove that children are more infectious. The paper only tested for viral RNA, not for infectious virus. Given that some people are clinically recovered but still have RNA in the throat, and that presence of viral RNA may not equate with live virus (see a Nature paper from two months ago), this is a rather severe limitation. Note that they may as well be: but you can't infer this from these results…
Exactly. The paper itself concludes somewhat softer that "children may be a potential source of contagion in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in spite of milder disease or lack of symptoms"
The patient group consisted of "children ... presenting to urgent care clinics or being hospitalized for confirmed/suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children", so they are pre-selected , making the role of the full amount of children in the population in spreading harder to know.
As you note, that doesnt rule it out either.
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#24It's common experience that children bring home all sorts of sniffles from school, there's a noticeable uptick in upper respiratory tract infections when the new school years starts in the fall. Many of these are caused by coronaviruses. With that in mind, the push to start school is based on wishful thinking, not on clinical evidence.
It's wishful thinking about how it will turn out (clearly it's not working out like people wanted) with a lot of magical thinking, and political expediency. The economy is hurting, and if you are a leading politician, you want the economy to improve, for people to see there is an end in sight and that we can go back to normal. All these motivations can be true at the same time.
America is so polarized and so many stupid people are convinced that there's some political basis behind the fact that masks prevent spreading, that the US won't be able to just recover from this until we have some combination of effective treatment and/or vaccines. We'll continue to have a lot of big cities, mostly liberal places probably, where people try to distance and wear masks (but not enough). Magical thinking won't make this go away, unlike a lot of other things that you can wish away or ignore when you are in a really rich country.
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are studies stating the opposite. They are not that popular in the popular media, because people don't like their "intuition" to be wrong". Not to mention, that the title is misleading.
> There are studies stating the opposite This is true for many subjects of interest (e.g. climate change), but of importance are the quality of the studies and where scientific consensus is going.
Most of this is coming from a study in France in early January where 2 British kids were infected and in contact with 130 other kids at different schools and none of them were infected. So now we can suppose that this study may have different issue.
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#26It's common experience that children bring home all sorts of sniffles from school, there's a noticeable uptick in upper respiratory tract infections when the new school years starts in the fall. Many of these are caused by coronaviruses. With that in mind, the push to start school is based on wishful thinking, not on clinical evidence.
The push to start school is based on the perceived economic necessity (arguably a cost-benefit analysis), of providing childcare for parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17.
It is very important for the development of the children to continue their education and socialize. Basically every child you ask will tell you it wants to go back to school. Making this about economics is nonsense.
It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other useless activities.
Disclaimer: this obviously varies from country to country.
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters. From a national perspective of producing competitive individuals in an increasingly international landscape? Yes, they do. They need at least a few hours of their day coached by an institution to direct their energies towards their studies. Otherwise Khan Academy would already solve 85% of the problems, because it is closely aligned to state curricula.
That's education, not babysitting. I totally agree that high school is important, but it should be geared more for teaching than for supervision. While elementary school does both.
I think that you grossly overestimate the median (or lower) teenager’s ability to behave responsibly when unsupervised.
Note that the median teenager (or lower), while possibly college-bound, is not really qualified for college and is not very academically inclined. Also note that they are decidedly not middle class or higher. They are constantly pushing and testing boundaries without the received wisdom to know when they have gone too far.
One of my biggest criticisms of modern day K-12 education, especially high school, is that it is mostly glorified baby sitting given the low amount of learning that takes place at the lower-end schools. The high school curriculum that we use today is roughly based on the same curriculum from late 1800s to early 1900s when only about 6% of people graduated from high school, and pretty much all of them went to college or a two-year school of some sort. High school was specifically designed to cater to college bound students.
A variant of this curriculum is used today even though approximately half of college-age students don’t go to college (including most high school dropouts). The curricular mismatch is a joke, and the only real reason high school can be justified for these students is, unfortunately, tax-funded babysitting.
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#28The study does not support the article title. Viral load is not the same as contribution to epidemiological spread.
The best study I'm aware of suggests an age-dependent effect, with older kids infecting others at about the adult rate, but young kids causing very little secondary infection: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-childr...
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The push to start school is based on the perceived economic necessity (arguably a cost-benefit analysis), of providing childcare for parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17.
It is very important for the development of the children to continue their education and socialize. Basically every child you ask will tell you it wants to go back to school. Making this about economics is nonsense. It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other use…
I think there's an interesting rhetorical split and contradiction.
The same politic groups, that would argue that teachers are the heroes of society that we can't live without, are now arguing that school must under no circumstance resume. We must indefinitely put off in-person schooling.
What? Is this the best we can do? Does this even measure up with scientific reality and risk calculation? Are teachers really that simultaneously important/unimportant? If the grocery baggers are working and handling the crisis well enough, so should teachers. It's clear that there's a class element to "essential worker." And this entire profession that seems to love the praise they generally receive from the left about how indispensable they are, are now suspiciously absent from the essential worker category.
You can only conclude that the social and mental development of children isn't essential.
If they cared enough, they'd use this crisis as an opportunity to start hiring younger teachers in droves to build up the workforce with relatively inexperienced teachers who aren't at much risk from the virus (at least compared to some 50-60yo teacher). But I suspect unions would stop at nothing to impede adaptive, efficient, and creative solutions.
Re: Children’s role in spread of virus bigger than thought
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The push to start school is based on the perceived economic necessity (arguably a cost-benefit analysis), of providing childcare for parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17.
It is very important for the development of the children to continue their education and socialize. Basically every child you ask will tell you it wants to go back to school. Making this about economics is nonsense. It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other use…
Traffic accidents don't follow a pattern of exponential propagation, nor do most other "everyday risks of life". A new virus is certainly exceptional circumstances warranting exceptional response.