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Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

nature.com

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#71
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what level of risk and mortality are we prepared to accept IMO, the rational answer to this question is 'the same risk and mortality that we have already accepted from influenza.' There is a lot of variability there, of course, but it is way above zero in any case.

That would seem to make sense if covid displaced flu entirely. But flu + equivalently harmful covid is twice as bad as historical flu.

Influenza B is thought to have been made extinct recently due to the pressures introduced by SARS-CoV-2

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211025/covid-pandemic-may-...

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#72
post #58

Finally some glimmers of hope in moving past Covid.. if Omicron continues on its current track of highly infectious but less serious —- and infection confers reactive immunity to a variety of strains, we could be closer to the endemic but manageable end game. Good vaccines + mild severity illness are basically the best case. What a stroke of luck that we are here vs a more infectious strain of Delta or some other nig…

> a more infectious strain of Delta What? Omicron is a more infectious version of Delta. Omicron causes the same number of deaths and hospitalisations and long covid as delta. It just also infects a lot more people more easily, and those people are at low risk and push the CFR down.

As the data becomes more available from South Africa, the UK, and Denmark, it’s starting to look like Omicron is a more infectious version of the wild type, maybe 40% less virulent than Delta, at least in terms of putting people in the hospital.

There’s still not enough data to conclude about mortality.

The good news is that prior immunity seems to confer a large degree of protection from severe illness still

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YBB9yZNJuz5j8hLdP/omicron-po...

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#73
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! I really hope governments will start recognising this and give us back our freedom. Media messages and restrictions are still pretty negative, despite the lack of severity. I don't know how can they talk about another lockdown. A lockdown is probably impractical at this point, but we are stuck with a disease that will be a health burden on humanity that will be difficult to eliminate. For example, if a diseas…

> For example, if a disease kills 40,000 people per year. That's 400,000 people in a decade. A drop in the bucket of humanity for sure, but that's about a city size population. That's not counting the collectively lost days in term of feeling terrible. Heart disease kills 659,000 people a year in the US alone ( https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm ), but for some reason we're not having COVID-level panic about…

> Heart disease kills 659,000 people a year in the US alone (https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm), but for some reason we're not having COVID-level panic about it.

I think you answered this yourself:

> Of course, heart disease isn't contagious

If heart disease were contagious and could be effectively curtailed by wearing masks and getting a vaccine, I think you'd see a similar reaction to it that you're seeing to covid.

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#74
post #64

Finally some glimmers of hope in moving past Covid.. if Omicron continues on its current track of highly infectious but less serious —- and infection confers reactive immunity to a variety of strains, we could be closer to the endemic but manageable end game. Good vaccines + mild severity illness are basically the best case. What a stroke of luck that we are here vs a more infectious strain of Delta or some other nig…

If infection grants more generalized immunity, doesn’t that mean a tailored vaccine would do the same?

Possibly yes.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-create...

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#75
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! I really hope governments will start recognising this and give us back our freedom. Media messages and restrictions are still pretty negative, despite the lack of severity. I don't know how can they talk about another lockdown. A lockdown is probably impractical at this point, but we are stuck with a disease that will be a health burden on humanity that will be difficult to eliminate. For example, if a diseas…

> For example, if a disease kills 40,000 people per year. That's 400,000 people in a decade. A drop in the bucket of humanity for sure, but that's about a city size population. That's not counting the collectively lost days in term of feeling terrible. Heart disease kills 659,000 people a year in the US alone ( https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm ), but for some reason we're not having COVID-level panic about…

Heart disease is not collapsing the health system. Why are we bothering to compare them.

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#76
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! I really hope governments will start recognising this and give us back our freedom. Media messages and restrictions are still pretty negative, despite the lack of severity. I don't know how can they talk about another lockdown. A lockdown is probably impractical at this point, but we are stuck with a disease that will be a health burden on humanity that will be difficult to eliminate. For example, if a diseas…

> For example, if a disease kills 40,000 people per year. That's 400,000 people in a decade. A drop in the bucket of humanity for sure, but that's about a city size population. That's not counting the collectively lost days in term of feeling terrible. Heart disease kills 659,000 people a year in the US alone ( https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm ), but for some reason we're not having COVID-level panic about…

The difficult thing about measuring causes of death is that we take it as axiomatic (and, to be clear, I think we're right to do so) that the goal is not for humans to live forever, that everyone should die of something. Heart disease mostly affects people who are at the age that people tend to die of "old age." In other words, eliminating heart disease entirely would largely only cause those people to die of something else. There are, I don't know, maybe 100-200K "premature" deaths from heart disease which ought to be the focus of public health interventions, but addressing the rest of them won't meaningfully save lives.

Or put another way: 22% of all deaths in the US happen in nursing homes. But we don't say we should get rid of nursing homes. If 22% of all deaths in a city happened in their college dormitories, there would be an immediate outcry to shut down the dormitories.

Now, the harder question is that covid also disproportionately affects people near the end of their natural life (and probably so does almost every medical cause of death besides, like, SIDS and pregnancy).

So the question is then, how many people does covid kill "before their time," so to speak, and how does that compare to heart disease? One of the common arguments is that it does kill lots of people before their time - even thought it skews towards the older, it nonetheless kills a good chunk of older folks who would have otherwise lived happy and healthy lives for several more years.

One way to measure this is by looking at excess deaths. How many people are dying of any cause compared to the year before covid was around? If covid was, say, killing people who were about to be killed by heart disease, we'd kind of expect a drop in heart disease death statistics. If we're not seeing that, then that implies that covid shouldn't be bucketed as an "old age" cause of death, that there's a reason to be more concerned about the 630,000 covid deaths over the past almost two years than the 659,000 heart disease deaths in 2019. And in fact it looks like the number of heart disease deaths didn't drop in 2020 (and grew, in fact) even as covid killed 350,000 people.

(You can get these numbers out of http://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html - which I found linked from the site you linked, thanks! - and break them down further by age etc.)

A lot of arguments that we should specifically care about covid (which is the camp I'm in) are predicated on the assumption that this is true; a lot of arguments that we should just treat it like we treat the flu are predicated on the assumption that it is not. I think this is a question of fact (though one that requires the statistics to actually be available) and not just a difference of opinion or worldview.

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#77
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We sacrificed the mental health of the young for the physical health of the old.

My kids' mental health would be pretty heavily impacted by the death of their grandparents. A pretty large number of kids are raised by "the old", too. https://www.prb.org/resources/more-u-s-children-raised-by-gr...

Let's not forget that 40% of adults in the US are obese and some immuno-compromised. As a parent who falls into one of those groups I hope we can find a path forward that balances personal liberty and our health.

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#78
post #24
post #3

So the long Covid we’ve been afraid of for our children this whole time has actually been long term immunity? How ironic that our own push to vaccinate and save our children could put them in a worse position immunity-wise. Like rain on your wedding day.

Is there any reason to assume that initial infection with Covid can't cause both immunity against subsequent infection AND long Covid symptoms? Think about how chicken pox works. You get infected, you deal with (usually but not always) mild symptoms, and then you don't get chicken pox again. But you are susceptible to shingles later in life.

Having gotten chicken pox intentionally then again as a teen, only to learn it significantly increases my risk for shingles later in life, I don't recommend natural infection when there is a vaccine. The second infection was particularly painful.

Please vaccinate your kids.

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#79
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We sacrificed the mental health of the young for the physical health of the old.

But hey, grandma gets to live another year now. Who cares if the poor family never recovers after financial crisis.

I am sure anyone can recover from financial troubles. It is possible.. The other one? Not so much...

Re: Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

#80
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biochemist here: your claim that vaccination puts children in a worse position is neither supported by this paper, nor substantiated by any other data point to the best of my knowledge.

Boys at least appear to be more in danger from the vaccine than the virus. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

This article is pretty much garbage. You need to compare getting myocarditis from vaxx vs covid. And chances of getting it from covid is ~11x higher.
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