There is a very high likelihood more kids have it and are asymptomatic than we know.
Spread is a different question.
I gave a couple of theorized reasons. Also, in terms of “catching” it, there’s some theorizing that the reason kids aren’t really catching it or being affected by it as much is that they have more antibodies in general than adults for other types of colds and that’s proving useful for fighting this. To that end, if we keep our kids locked up for a year it’s possible we may be putting them in a worse position immunity wise to fight COVID when they come into contact with it.
There’s a lot we don’t understand and if you can’t focus on the what without having definitive answers about the why then it’s going to be impossible to evaluate policy.
Numbers are beginning to rise for kids, probably because, at least in part, they’re not staying alone in their bedrooms all day anymore. Nearly 100 thousand kids got it in a couple of weeks in July, and there are almost surely more. Just heard a public health expert say that, especially with the new data, it’s really not safe for anyone, especially staff, to return to school in hotspots. Awesome!
Thanks for posting this Sam. I sure hope
Sedrick has a complete recovery from this.
I think this pretty much will derail plans for
College football in the fall IMHO. For those that disagree, that’s fine, and wish you and any games that might be played the best possible outcome.
At some point NCAA needs to do its job as the regulatory authority for college athletics and just hit pause on athletics for the fall…and then maybe in the spring. Resume in 2021 and let all eligible players return even if they have graduated and are not taking classes.
I’m enjoying the rockets and have to hand it to the NBA and the players for making this bubble work.
But college sports is a different thing entirely. These are student athletes. There is no bubble for them. We need to treat them like students and put their health and safety first. Of course there are too many organizations out there that stand to lose too much money. But these athletes don’t get a dime of it. And yet we are asking them to put their health and the health of the their loved ones at risk.
I was in the camp of thinking we probably shouldn’t have college football this fall but have changed my mind today based on the strong statements of players wanting to play but even moreso the rationale Trevor Lawrence and several coaches have brought up. Realistically I think the players are safer, even with respect to COVID-19, if they are at school being monitored, regularly tested and incentivized to sacrifice for the season vs just going home for the semester.
Did you see where one of our kids, Sedrick Williams, suffered heart damage from a Covid infection? This isn’t a cold, but whatever. I hate to miss an entire year of college football, but I don’t think we’ll have much choice.
Yes. Reading up on this a little more some things are saying other viral infections can cause cardiomyopathy as well. I’ll have to look into that a little more.
In any event, the main reason I support it is if you look at the positive tests these kids had when they showed up to summer workouts vs the positive number of tests they’ve had since workouts started (while infections nationwide are increasing) I’m pretty convinced that realistically speaking they are probably even more likely to catch COVID-19 if you just send them home for the semester or if they stay on campus but don’t have the goal of finishing a football season to keep them in line.
On a personal level I’m more than okay with missing a football season (hoops is much harder for me to give up though) but I’m really not sold these kids will be better off if we skip it.
If the protocol outside of football is opening in person classes and zero guidance by public officials you probably are right unfortunately. Might as well play.
But the minute that one of the thousands of college athletes dies from COVID, the narrative changes. Age isn’t the only risk factor. Someone brought this up in the other thread, but a lot of linemen are medically obese.
And another article on children and covid. This one
claims kids under 5 carry a massive covid viral load
and past vaccinations may offer benefits to those infected. Also notes covid looks to be killing more young kids than the flu does annually. 90 (?) deaths in kids so far.
“It’s not fair to say that this virus is completely benign in children,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, vice-chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. “We’ve had 90 deaths in children in the US already, in just a few months. Every year we worry about influenza in children, and there are roughly around 100 deaths in children from influenza every year.”
I was about to post that article. One important quote from it: ""Children ages zero to five can be “highly infectious to other people. It turns out they have a thousand times more virus in their nose than you need to infect, so they’re very, very contagious,” said William Haseltine, a former professor at Harvard Medical School during an interview Monday on CNN.
90% month over month increase in the number of infections in kids. This supports the idea that kids were never really immune to COVID, but that up until recently they were typically not put in situations that exposed them to the virus, and were typically not tested. I’m pretty sure this will be validated in a couple of weeks…
I’ve seen most of the stuff already other than the increase in juvenile cases being more recent.
The viral load in the nose has been known. That’s part of why some are theorizing about kids being lower to the ground and having less force with your breath (and me theorizing that kids not really sneezing or coughing with it much) is part of why kids haven’t seemed to spread it as much so far.
I don’t really buy the argument that kids just haven’t been exposed to it. That works somewhat for TX and other places that exploded over the summer, but kids in NY would have had just as much of a chance for exposure in their early outbreak. Same with all the European countries that shut down early. Sweden kept their schools open the whole time and had a similar scenario where I don’t think they’ve had a single kid die from it and hospitalizations for kids are very low. Not to mention that almost every kid has adults in their home anyways.
Of those 90 deaths (which is concerning and sad) I think the overwhelming majority are older kids with high risk factors. I’ve consistently felt that we need to be more cautious with older kids than younger kids based on what we know so far and if they have other risk factors they for sure shouldn’t be going to school unless transmission is very low.
The point about other immunizations possibly helping kind of goes to what I was talking about in another post. If other types of immunity are helping fight this it’s possible that locking our kids up for a year and not strengthening their immune system like normal could put them in a worse position to fight the virus if/when they get it.
I worry that we didn’t know about kids having it because they don’t get really sick. For that reason, they weren’t getting tested much early on.
That doesn’t stop them from spreading it though. Lots of unknowns here and I’m worried about rolling the dice. I just hope we are willing to shut it down quickly if it starts spreading and that it isn’t too late by that point.
I also fear that any false starts will be tougher on kids than just rolling with distance learning for a period.
Kids in NYC weren’t in school during their big surge though. The whole country shut schools down quickly.
This will be the first real global test of what happens when you open schools in the middle of a surge. Things are undoubtedly worse now than they were in the early Spring when we shut schools down. We will learn a lot in the next 6 weeks.
Lots of questions and I agree that I hope decision makers don’t get locked into a re-opening and staying open decision based on stubbornness. By the same token I hope that politicization doesn’t lead to overreacting to individual events either.
I think/hope our local districts in Houston/Harris County will manage the reopening better than some of those Georgia schools as well.
Likewise. I think the city of Houston has its head on straight with regards to opening and closing. My main concern is what happens in the rest of the country where the mindset of Georgia is prevalent because they hadn’t really dealt with a surge yet. People don’t really listen to data. It’s only when it hits close to home that they understand the severity of things.
