This. The same speculation went on with alpha and turned out to be wrong. |
Citation needed. No they are not. |
Sure, here's ONE example, of many. Dr. Mark Kline Physician-in-Chief at Children's Hospital New Orleans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHf_mr_uno "The Delta variant of COVID is every infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist worst nightmare. I don't think as Americans in our lifetime we have ever seen an organism that possesses the dual characteristics of contagiousness that this virus has together with the virulence - the ability to produce disease. There was a myth that circulated during the first year of the pandemic that children somehow were immune. We know that those were fallacies all along, but particularly now that the Delta variant has emerged it has become very clear that children are being heavily impacted by this organism and by this pandemic at this point, more than ever before." |
| Long Covid Kids is run by a poet, a "wellness" entrepreneur, and a psychology lecturer, so you will forgive me if I give no credence to anything they say. I'm sorry to have given their website a hit. |
That person is neither a virologist or epidemiologist. |
That article does attempt to do a comparison for other kids with symptoms but not COVID, and it turns out that they're similar in length. |
I know Dr. Kline is talking about the number of pediatric ICU patients increasing in recent weeks in New Orleans. Certainly that is troubling. It's not evidence, though, that there is a relevant increase in virulence. It still might be evidence that covid is more transmissible (more cases x same virulence = more hospitalizations). Here's many articles that suggest otherwise, including ones looking at delta in UK: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/990789.page |
https://twitter.com/heather_haq/status/1421287982414409730?s=21 This thread by a respected doctor at a major pediatric hospital may be worth a read. We are just over 10% higher in vaccination rate, but our vaccination numbers in DC proper aren’t nearly high enough to dismiss that scenario as an illegitimate concern. We can’t close schools again, but this is probably going to be a tough fall semester. Vaccines for the majority of kids under 12 will be here in a matter of months. Let’s just keep that in mind. |
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Parents cavalier or resigned attitudes is what worries me the most this fall.
We’ve heard from experts their concern about the impact Delta will have on kids. In order to keep kids healthy and in the classroom as long as possible, we all need to be in this together. So many on this board refuse to listen to experts and simply shrug their shoulders. I have an SN kid who needs to be in-person to receive services — but also has a rare disease that puts them at risk of severe outcomes if they contract covid. If not for your kid, then please for mine — take this seriously. |
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An example from the UK, which recently saw delta peak:
https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1513 Regarding hospitalization NUMBERS (not rates) in UK: June 15, 2021 Are more children becoming ill? There are no official figures on this, although leaders in the area of child health have refuted suggestions made by members of the Scottish government that children were now more at risk from covid-19 and that many had been admitted to hospital. Steve Turner, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health registrar and consultant paediatrician at Royal Aberdeen Children’s hospital, said, “As it stands there are very few children in hospital in Scotland and across the whole of the UK due to covid. We’re not seeing any evidence of an increase in paediatric admissions with covid. A very small number of admissions who test positive for covid is what we’d expect. “Our experience over the last 15 months is that many children who test positive have come into hospital for something else, like broken bones. At the moment the situation in the UK is stable. The number of children in hospital with covid remains very low.” |
We are listening to experts. We are reading. We are not focused on alarmist media that doesn't have denominators. We are weighing risks (perhaps differently). Arguing with evidence, parsing articles, is not being cavalier. It is desperately trying to get some sanity in the constant barrage of alarm. We've been fed a steady diet of alarm for a year and a half. And that alarm is about our children. I think most of us are just tired of being that escalated, and have realized we need to find a different way of evaluating information. |
| Hey don’t get medical advice from the internet. Have you ever read the Health and Medicine threads? It will take you approximately 30 seconds to find a comment that you will immediately realize is just made by someone who is talking out of their azz. Talk to your trusted pediatrician. |
This is simply not true. Experts have been quoted over and over to attest that there is no evidence that Delta is more virulent in kids, or that Long Covid is a significant risk for them. You might not agree with those experts based on what you hear on the news, but we are absolutely listening to experts. Nobody is saying there isn’t a higher risk of transmission in schools with delta, which is obviously a problem for higher risk kids like yours. I am sorry you are facing this situation, but we cannot make policy for all children based on the needs of a few. Schools need to open full time with mitigations in place, but not those that make full time school impossible. |
I'm having a hard time finding scientific articles in that thread. I see NYTimes, Slate, Guardian, DW, nbc news, npr, time, fortune, Forbes (admittedly it does discuss an AAP report that states that the last week has added 77,000 seventy-seven thousand more positive children), BMJ is a medical journal, but the link is to an editorial form mid-June that says 'nothing to see here, most kids coming into the hospital with covid are coming i for broken bones' - contrast that with Dr. Kline's statement, or today's statement by the Surgeon General. A lot of posters' opinions minimizing the threat, then it's kid vaccine hesitancy. You demand a LOT of support to posters' statements (and to statements posters haven't made "prove delta is worse in kids than in adults!") but that linked thread.... |
Wait are you saying you are more inclined to listen to Dr. Kline's interview statements than an editorial in BMJ with citations? Having been involved in writing editorials for major journals in other disciplines, like Nature, I can tell you that they don't just let anyone write, and there is a review process. |