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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Damn.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/07/31/new-evidence-suggests-young-children-spread-covid-19-more-efficiently-than-adults/[/quote]

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  It has not been peer reviewed.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.

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