Reply to Article on delta specifically in children

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[quote=Anonymous]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/delta-variant-covid-children/619712/

This Atlantic article has an alarming title but some good info.

The article starts with some alarming descriptions and then goes on its second half which sort of undoes everything from the first half:

"Amid all the chaos is perhaps one tentative silver lining for children. The new variant appears to be following the long-standing trend that kids are, on average, more resistant to the coronavirus’s effects. Although Delta is a more cantankerous version of the virus than its predecessors, researchers don’t yet have evidence that it is specifically worse for children, who are still getting seriously sick only a small fraction of the time. Less than 2 percent of known pediatric COVID-19 cases, for instance, result in hospitalization, sometimes far less.
...
The alarming rise of pediatric cases seems to reflect the grimness of infectious arithmetic: More kids are falling ill because more children are being infected; more children are being infected because this virus has seeped so thoroughly into the communities most vulnerable to it.

Reports of more sickness—maybe even distinct sickness—from states such as Arkansas are worrisome. But maybe these startling effects are explicable. Permar said she isn’t yet seeing this trend play out on a national scale, particularly in states where demand for vaccines has been high. Perhaps kids in high-transmission states, where exposures to Delta are heavy and frequent, are simply being hit with more virus. Delta is already ace at accumulating in the airways of people of all ages, more frequently and more consistently than any variant before, according to Jennifer Dien Bard, the director of the clinical microbiology and virology laboratory at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. More inbound pathogen might further increase the amount of virus that sticks around to run roughshod over the body. That said, experts told me, it’s still possible that new data could pinpoint a unique effect of Delta on children, especially because so much of what we know already comes from studying adults.

The United Kingdom offers some encouraging clues, and might serve as a bellwether for America’s coming months. The variant’s recent reign triggered a climb in pediatric cases there as well, but kids didn’t seem to make up an unexpected proportion of the surge, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious-disease physician at the NIHR Southampton Clinical Research Facility, told me. As things stand, he said, “there’s no indication” that Delta poses a particular menace to kids."[/quote]

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