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Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

nature.com

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

#91

Serious question: should we let this more infectious but less dangerous run its course to achieve natural immunity? What are the arguments for and against this strategy? I know that if it is 5 times less likely to put people in hospitals but 10 times more transmissible then there will be 2 times more people in hospitals, but are there more arguments?

Yes. We should do that. We won't. Pro: everyone is fine, the hospitals aren't overwhelmed, the anti-vaxxers will be fine along with everyone else. Con: can't speak with disgust and disdain anymore to those who disagree with your medical opinions, or have concerns with how quickly you're forcing your experimental medications on the entire planet. Not going to happen. I've already seen the usual suspects talking about…

> everyone is fine

Except the people who aren't.

> the hospitals aren't overwhelmed

Except the ones that are.

> forcing your experimental medications on the entire planet

No more experimental than any other vaccine; due to how quickly COVID spread, we were able to do the same level of testing on the vaccine as for any other medication. It's as safe as anything else you take.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Healthcare system capacity is somewhat fungible. If we reduced heart disease then there would be more resources available to deal with other conditions such as COVID-19. The majority of heart disease cases could be prevented, or at least delayed, by making better lifestyle choices.

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

#93
post #22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment was made intending to shut down discussion by appealing to authority rather than engaging in the substance of the discussion. Note that the last large paragraph you wrote which does engage with the discussion was added via an edit. This was the entirety of your original post: “{{citation needed}} My point is that this is unsubstantiated.”

I was not "appealing to authority". The fact that I'm an expert in the field is, imo, valuable meta-information. I weigh people's opinions differently if they're rooted in expertise than if they're random anonymous people on the internet. Do what you want with that information, and please forgive my hasty edits: sometimes when I read back what I wrote, I notice that I'm missing something. There's no bad faith there.

sorry, being 'an expert' has no bearing on the veracity of your claims. and further, claiming the nominative of 'expert' tends to negatively correlate with veracity. at best, you're an expert at the thing you study deeply, not the whole field. you perhaps may be more knowledgeable about different aspects of a given field, but that doesn't give you extraordinary powers of insight or reasoning.

the exact opposite of your appeal is what teases out the known from the unknown, by triangulating from many arguments/opinions (the more, the better) whether they be 'expert' or not (the less correlated, the better).

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think the endgame is clear in the US. Most states have dropped all restrictions and those that haven’t will suffer economically and politically until they drop their restrictions. The only question is how much economic and political suffering individual cities and states will tolerate. Virginia voters threw out their entire Democrat government and governor and will likely join the list of states banning…

You've been downvoted, but you're not wrong. Witness the number of people who have left California.

I’m not making a values argument either way. It just seems apparent that people are tired of restrictions, and those people seem more likely to vote. The result in Virginia was shocking and should have been a wake up call to Democrats.

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

#95
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the histories of the other coronaviruses? And would those histories be more relevant than histories of non coronaviruses?

Another coronavirus probably caused a worldwide pandemic starting in 1889. It killed a lot of people, but the survivors gained natural immunity which gave them significant protection against symptomatic reinfections. The same virus HCoV-OC43 is still endemic today. This seems relevant to the current pandemic. https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC…

I understand this is a reoccurring theme throughout history that lead to most of the endemic coronaviruses today. Omicron is truly fantastic; for example look at Ontario’s case count vs ICU count. Omicron has completely decoupled those graphs.

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

#96
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...

And here's the impact of how we've treated children during the pandemic:

>The pandemic then brought on physical isolation, ongoing uncertainty, fear and grief. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers quantified that toll in several reports. They found between March and October 2020, emergency department visits for mental health emergencies rose by 24% for children ages 5-11 years and 31% for children ages 12-17 years. In addition, emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts increased nearly 51% among girls ages 12-17 years in early 2021 compared to the same period in 2019.[0]

>A total of 83 articles (80 studies) met inclusion criteria. Of these, 63 studies reported on the impact of social isolation and loneliness on the mental health of previously healthy children and adolescents (n = 51,576; mean age 15.3 years). In all, 61 studies were observational, 18 were longitudinal, and 43 were cross-sectional studies assessing self-reported loneliness in healthy children and adolescents.[1]

>Children and adolescents are probably more likely to experience high rates of depression and most likely anxiety during and after enforced isolation ends. This may increase as enforced isolation continues. Clinical services should offer preventive support and early intervention where possible and be prepared for an increase in mental health problems.[1]

Experts think this is just the tip of the iceberg for issues that will affect us for decades.

0. https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/17718/AAP-AACAP-CH... 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089085672...

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

#97
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper itself asks the question I’ve suggested if you read between the lines: “COVID-19 vaccines are now being administered widely to adult populations and are also being delivered to children in some countries. Therefore, it is imperative to understand the profile of SARS-CoV-2-specific immune responses in children after natural infection to inform vaccination strategy.”

The policy question this answers is whether to vaccinate children who have previously been infected, not whether to vaccinate children who have never been infected. The best decision for the latter group remains vaccination.

Children have nearly no risk of complications with covid vs. quite a large risk with the vaccine.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary concern form day one has been the capacity of our healthcare systems. "Peak pandemic mortality" includes scores of people dying from unrelated illness due to lack of care. Does anyone truly think its acceptable to let people die in ambulances outside of hospitals because a highly contagious disease filled all the hospital beds and medical staff is too fatigued to work? Maybe people with a political axe to…

No, lots of people do actually think that, but we believe that three main methods can be employed to mitigate this: 1. aggressive triage based on chances and QALY remaining 2. increased healthcare funding 3. voluntary isolation of individuals who see lockdown as being preferable to their personal coronavirus risk Will it result in more deaths than February 2020? Sure. But we don't have that choice because sars2 exist…

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

#99
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…

Beyond squabbling on numbers (COVID was actively fought in most developed countries, otherwise it would have killed many more), the difference is control.

Heart disease is well-understood, and largely avoidable with education; hence, it's not a problem as far as the ruling classes are concerned.

COVID and other infectious diseases, on the other hand, can hit literally anybody with a social life. They are fundamentally uncontrollable at the individual level, and have the potential to upset the social order if the numbers get out of control (as they did, shortly, last year). Until that continues to be the case, COVID will continue to be addressed as a significant problem.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Myocarditis didn't become a concern until the jabs were rolling out
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