Children spread covid more effectively than adults
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Anonymous
The problem with that approach is that parents need childcare NOW. We don't need to have overnight camp or soccer leagues and I certainly don't think that sending all kids everywhere to K-12 in September is a good idea, but saying that NO child should be in daycare ignores both the realities of making a living and the actual lived experience of daycares that have been operating safely this whole time. |
Anonymous
Ideally no one should be in childcare, but those who are already in i essential workers. We should be making every effort to keep non essential workers at home with their kids. |
Anonymous
The approach should be financially baking parents and employers so the vast majority stay home. It also stands to reason that the reason that overall there have been few outbreaks from daycares and schools, is because there has been few people in them. |
Anonymous
DH and I both WFH, although DH will be required to be back in the office full time in two weeks. We made the decision to send both of our kids back to daycare 2 weeks ago. Our center reopened back at the end of May. They’ve had one case - a staff member. Headcount appears to be half the usual. There are 8 kids in older DD’s class and 6 in the infant room (younger DD is 3mo). Ideally, I would keep the kids home, as we did for the first 4 months of this. But, even with WFH, it wasn’t sustainable long-term. My hours aren’t very flexible, I’m expected to actively participate in several hours’ worth of meetings every day, and our older DD was struggling with the changes. I’m likely to be told to report back in another month or two, myself. Grandparents are older and can’t provide long-term care. Nanny isn’t an option. We have no one to form a pod with...so here we are. Daycare it is. |
Anonymous
DP, but the bolded just is not true. Essential childcare in Maryland, for example, has been operating for five months, overwhelmingly safely. Of course there are outbreaks at camps and in daycares where *adults* in particular are not wearing masks, distancing, etc.--both at work and at home. There absolutely are ways to provide childcare that minimize risk to children and adults. The JAMA Pediatrics study doesn't say anything about actual disease transmission; it's about viral load. Maybe kids need much higher viral loads to be symptomatic or even develop COVID, regardless of exposure to SARS-CoV2. That's another interpretation of the data, though it's as politically exciting as "kids spread the virus more than adults" (and if you think scientific publication isn't partially politically motivated, you know very little about the process). |
Anonymous
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This is a perfect example of why non-scientists -- i.e., journalists -- should not attempt to interpret scientific studies. The study from Italy is a PRE-PRINT. It has not been peer reviewed. And its interpretation has some serious flaws. For starters, they studied around 2800 people with coronavirus and performed contact tracing to determine how many of their contacts became infected. But ONLY 70% of the 2800 had laboratory confirmed covid-19. This was in March and April, also known as cold and flu season. So they start off their study by examining people who may not even have had covid!!! Second, the people being tested at this point in time were SYMPTOMATIC. That means we're only assessing how well symptomatic cases pass on suspected covid. We already know that children tend to be asymptomatic. Asymptomatic cases are less likely to spread because the person isn't coughing, unlike symptomatic cases, who cough on average something like once per minute. In fact, the vast majority of asymptomatic cases dont shed detectable viral particles by breathing alone -- only a small percentage do, but this the reason we are covering our faces. "The risk of developing symptoms or being found to have a positive test and thus being defined as a case increased with the age of the contact, from a low of 8.4% in contacts 0-14 years of age to 18.9% in those over 75 years." According to this same paper, young children were the least likely to become infected by a sick person. The most likely explanation is that the children were asymptomatic, and thus their cases went undetected in this study. But they were clearly less likely to develop *symptomatic* disease when in contact with an infected individual. Combining this with what we already know, it looks like kids can and do catch covid from other kids -- but they are the age group most likely to be asymptomatic when they become infected. And asymptomatic people are less likely to spread covid to others. This explains what we are seeing on a larger scale in other studies -- fewer kids getting and passing covid to others. |
Anonymous
Scientist here, agreed. This breathless Forbes article was an unfortunate example of irresponsible journalism, and I'm dismayed to see that it is being circulated so widely. |
Anonymous
Agree with all of this. I also think of the reporting about the "covid can last for x days on various surfaces" study earlier this year, which I think has ultimately done more harm than good, as people focused way more energy on surfaces than they did on preventing spread by respiratory droplets. The study never said anything about the surviving particles being infectious, which was clear if you read it or read analysis by medical scientists. However, the media took it and all of a sudden people were bleaching their amazon packages. I feel the same way about the schools issue. NO ONE is suggesting that kids can't get covid. NO ONE is suggesting that they can't spread it. Ample on-the-ground evidence suggests that they get it less and spread it less. German research has suggested that children act as a "break" on the disease. Icelandic research has documented not one case of child-adult transmission (all of the kids their got it from adults). The kids in the GA summer camp got it from a teenaged counselor(s). The number of kids infected at daycares worldwide is tiny. And yet, the media see something like this and conclude that kids are super spreaders. That is neither what the original study said, nor what the evidence on the ground says. |
Anonymous
Thanks to you and pp for posting. You're restoring my faith in humanity, just a little bit. The amount of irrational conversation around the schools issue is driving me batty. I need to get off of DCUM and all social media. |
Anonymous
Agreed *1000. The sheer level of insanity here is scary.... |
Anonymous
I appreciate your comments. Unfortunately it looks like more are interested in spinning things to support an agenda than looking at the data. I also think things are so polarized that many are only interested in yes/no answers. ie it looks like surface transmission is possible but so much less of a transmission vector than whats in the air that it hardly matters in the overall numbers, but like you pointed out many get stuck there since it's not zero possibility. I expect the answer is similar for spaced outdoor transmission without masks where it's possible but not enough to drive a pandemic. The main question that should be under investigation currently should be transmission by kids young enough to need adult supervision at home. If the data from around the world starts showing that's below the transmission rate to drive a pandemic (or drops below with a hybrid school model) then getting the younger kids in school in communities where the overall rate is below a threshold can happen even though there's not zero possibility of transmission. Personally, I'm not satisfied with the info from the GA camp yet and guess more will come out. To get to 260 cases in that short of a time, there were either more seed cases or they were doing something to spread it with a faster attack rate than pretty much anywhere else we've seen. |
Anonymous
| I simply cannot send my first grader to school and toddler back to daycare in good conscience. Too much is unknown at this point. I only hope my employer continues to allow me to work from home. DH is deployed so it’s just me. |
Anonymous
One of the quoted PPs and I agree with all of this, including the analysis of the GA summer camp, which is just such a strange case. But yes, Everyone wants a "cause" and a clear path to safety, but there just isn't one. FWIW, my politics would generally place me pretty squarely allied with the "no school" camp. It's strange to see all of my friends and peers posting alarmist anti-in-person school reporting, like the Forbes piece, since to me they seem kind of like anti-vaxxers with the "why would I take a risk? We just don't know enough? It hasn't been studied" line of reasoning. I agree that nationally schools shouldn't be doing in-person learning universally, and that middle/high schools should do distance learning entirely for the time being, but the pandemic has really lead me to question the analytical skills of people I used to respect about topics like these. |
Anonymous
I completely disagree. Many, many daycares and preschools have been operating safely throughout the pandemic. My own kids are at a daycare that reported a single covid case in 5 months, and the kid was AT school while symptomatic (for at least a few hours) and no one else got it -- no kids in the classroom, no teachers, no siblings. There are loads of nonessential personnel with kids in daycare right now -- I haven't taken any government aid, continue to make my full paycheck, and continue to contribute at more-or-less the same level as I did pre-pandemic. My kids' teachers get my tuition $, helping them maintain employment and helping the daycare operate without relying too heavily on government support. I consider the risks to be low enough for kids the age of my children that I am comfortable with all of this. If my city has covid numbers get out of control again, and goes back into lockdown, I, and many other nonessential workers, will make it work. The government will (hopefully) step in to keep childcare facilities afloat. If I were just paid not to work, and instead to watch my kids, during our current time, I worry about falling behind my coworkers at my job since very few other people I work with have young kids. I want to work. My kids want to be in daycare. My daycare teachers want to be teaching. Global and personal evidence indicates that the risk of daycares continuing to operate is low. To me, this is enough. |
Anonymous
| SO why wasn't it safe to have kids at school and daycare in a large scale for the last 5 months, but it is now? |