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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

[b]This is a perfect example of why non-scientists -- i.e., journalists -- should not attempt to interpret scientific studies.[/b]  [b]The study from Italy is a PRE-PRINT.  It has not been peer reviewed.  And its interpretation has some serious flaws.[/b]

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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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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.

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