It's good to have independent confirmation, but to my recollection, a months-old German study already reported high viral loads in the respiratory tracts of asymptomatic infected children. The idea that children don't spread COVID much has always been grounded more in wishful thinking than evidence.
There are studies stating the opposite. They are not that popular in the popular media, because people don't like their "intuition" to be wrong".
Not to mention, that the title is misleading.
This is true for many subjects of interest (e.g. climate change), but of importance are the quality of the studies and where scientific consensus is going.
Most of this is coming from a study in France in early January where 2 British kids were infected and in contact with 130 other kids at different schools and none of them were infected. So now we can suppose that this study may have different issue.
this is interesting news, but it annoys me a little bit that all it really says is that children "can" carry a higher viral load... OBVIOUSLY the most salient fact is whether children are more conducive / likely to spread the virus / etc. because clearly the question is not whether children can get the virus, etc., but whether they are a more potent attack vector than the general population. or maybe people seriously thought that because the virus has reduced symptoms in children that children somehow don't... catch the virus at all? it is hard to not feel like there is a paternalistic bent in the way this information is presented, and one that exists only to subvert the kind of maximally shallow, facile social media critique that will be promulgated by people who are anti-mask/-etc. anyway... why must the communication of the truth in so many spheres be polluted by the mere possibility* of out-of-context quotation causing stupid people to throw a hissy fit? apologies if it turns out I misread the ambiguous wording in this report, though I think the point still stands generally, at least from my own experience...
You seem to be arguing two opposing points: both that there is a lack of certainty that would help the general public understand, and that somehow the information is being shaped by how the general public understands. Argue one point or the other, and you might get a more cogent response.
As it is, I'm left thinking that science is built on limited understanding, stating only what the evidence to hand supports, and that the problem with the understanding of the general public is that they want certainty now when there are only more questions and areas to research for now.
Research should not extrapolate far beyond what can be proven, regardless of how the result is filtered and distorted by consumers of social media.
> this is interesting news, but it annoys me a little bit that all it really says is that children "can" carry a higher viral load
No it doesn't. In the first paragraph it says:
> The infected children were shown to have a significantly higher level of virus in their airways than hospitalized adults in ICUs for COVID-19 treatment, according to Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Mass General Hospital for Children (MGHfC).
So they SHOWED in patients that it DOES have higher viral load. First paragraph.
The second paragraph contradicts your reading further:
> The study, “Pediatric SARS-CoV-2: Clinical Presentation, Infectivity, and Immune Reponses,” was published today in The Journal of Pediatrics.
> “I was surprised by the high levels of virus we found in children of all ages, especially in the first two days of infection,” says Lael Yonker, director of the
Maybe there's a reasonable question about how susceptible children are to infection? Like, conditional on infection they have high viral loads that likely make them spreaders, but maybe it's hard for the virus to take hold in children? Just speculation, personally not inclined to believe it.
To me the real issue here is how did they select the children. Unfortunately, I cannot find the paper. Why don't they ever link to these things? A likely restatement of this article is, "To have even mild symptoms of COVID, children need a much higher viral load than hospitalized adults." Again, I'd love to find the paper to see if my guess is right.
Thanks! I'll note it is exactly what I thought. This was not a random population. This is children showing symptoms bad enough to warrant going to the hospital.
It's common experience that children bring home all sorts of sniffles from school, there's a noticeable uptick in upper respiratory tract infections when the new school years starts in the fall. Many of these are caused by coronaviruses. With that in mind, the push to start school is based on wishful thinking, not on clinical evidence.
> With that in mind, the push to start school is based on wishful thinking, not on clinical evidence.
Saying "clinical" here is a bit of wishful thinking. Clinical testing would mean random selection and random assignment in a medical experiment for kids. With an adverse hypothesis.
The push to start school is based on the perceived economic necessity (arguably a cost-benefit analysis), of providing childcare for parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17.
I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters. We can probably split the difference some on this between elementary school (where the babysitting really is kind of economically important) and the older kids.
> I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters.
From a national perspective of producing competitive individuals in an increasingly international landscape? Yes, they do. They need at least a few hours of their day coached by an institution to direct their energies towards their studies.
Otherwise Khan Academy would already solve 85% of the problems, because it is closely aligned to state curricula.
That's education, not babysitting. I totally agree that high school is important, but it should be geared more for teaching than for supervision. While elementary school does both.
I think that you grossly overestimate the median (or lower) teenager’s ability to behave responsibly when unsupervised.
Note that the median teenager (or lower), while possibly college-bound, is not really qualified for college and is not very academically inclined. Also note that they are decidedly not middle class or higher. They are constantly pushing and testing boundaries without the received wisdom to know when they have gone too far.
One of my biggest criticisms of modern day K-12 education, especially high school, is that it is mostly glorified baby sitting given the low amount of learning that takes place at the lower-end schools. The high school curriculum that we use today is roughly based on the same curriculum from late 1800s to early 1900s when only about 6% of people graduated from high school, and pretty much all of them went to college or a two-year school of some sort. High school was specifically designed to cater to college bound students.
A variant of this curriculum is used today even though approximately half of college-age students don’t go to college (including most high school dropouts). The curricular mismatch is a joke, and the only real reason high school can be justified for these students is, unfortunately, tax-funded babysitting.
And Khan Academy is the proxy for education without supervision. If teenagers didn't need supervision, than Khan Academy would already be doing 85% of the job, as it's a top-notch resource for education.
Judging by the emotional fragility of college students and adults in the US, but also other countries which feel that words are violence and feel unsafe at the slightest sign of criticism of their ideas you might have a point that there's high demand for babysitters.
It is very important for the development of the children to continue their education and socialize. Basically every child you ask will tell you it wants to go back to school. Making this about economics is nonsense.
It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other useless activities.
Disclaimer: this obviously varies from country to country.
I think there's an interesting rhetorical split and contradiction.
The same politic groups, that would argue that teachers are the heroes of society that we can't live without, are now arguing that school must under no circumstance resume. We must indefinitely put off in-person schooling.
What? Is this the best we can do? Does this even measure up with scientific reality and risk calculation? Are teachers really that simultaneously important/unimportant? If the grocery baggers are working and handling the crisis well enough, so should teachers. It's clear that there's a class element to "essential worker." And this entire profession that seems to love the praise they generally receive from the left about how indispensable they are, are now suspiciously absent from the essential worker category.
You can only conclude that the social and mental development of children isn't essential.
If they cared enough, they'd use this crisis as an opportunity to start hiring younger teachers in droves to build up the workforce with relatively inexperienced teachers who aren't at much risk from the virus (at least compared to some 50-60yo teacher). But I suspect unions would stop at nothing to impede adaptive, efficient, and creative solutions.
Buying food is necessary to stay alive. Kids attending school in person is not.
If there were a real plan in place to ensure safety, and if adults were willing to sacrifice in other areas like going out to bars then school could work if we had consistent isolated groups.
As it stands, at least in Ontario, there's been a strong push to "open up" bars and restaurants etc which to me is public mixing incompatible with the mixing of students in a class. Pick one: school or everything else.
But you're not owning up to the possible irreparable damage to children's psyche, mental wellbeing, career prospects, etc.
At least be honest about the tradeoffs. If I'm saying that people are overestimating risk and people will blame me for associated mortality and effects of the disease, it's like the other side of the debate is never that open and explicit about the very serious drawbacks and costs of their choices.
Let's be fair to both sides: you're responsible for suicides, health effects of prolonged isolation, etc.
> irreparable damage to children's psyche, mental wellbeing
That will be the case if they continue school.
> Let's be fair to both sides: you're responsible for suicides, health effects of prolonged isolation, etc.
With that logic you are personally responsible for suicides, health effects of bullying and school slavery, etc.
> and people will blame me for associated mortality and effects of the disease
I do not think that blaming people for expressing their opinion will be worth much to the family who just lost one of its members. It is cheap for you to accept blame and worthless to these that suffer due to following the same belief.
Schools and kindergartens even more are the perfect environment for spreading diseases and especially respiratory viruses. Spending multiple hours in a closed, often poorly ventilated room often without wearing masks is a recipe for disaster.
You're also misinformed about the risks to young people. An unknown amount of mild courses (I've read about estimates of 10%) result in long-term damage, just like with SARS. These people are called COVID long-haulers.
Isn’t it misinformation to cite “an unknown amount” and then assume the worst case scenario to bolster your argument? This is the logic of an agoraphobe.
Traffic accidents don't follow a pattern of exponential propagation, nor do most other "everyday risks of life". A new virus is certainly exceptional circumstances warranting exceptional response.
No one's arguing that they should be locked down alone in a room for the duration of the pandemic. They'll spend time with their family and probably see at least some friends.
Somehow kids are able to survive summer holidays or home schooling without grave developmental consequences.
This is purely about economic consequences and it's a calculated risk that the outbreaks in schools will be able to be contained without having to shut down the entire educational system again and forcing families to both work and take care of their kids.
Maybe this is true for older children. For younger ones i cannot agree. Children go through various phases which are very important in their development. You cannot just postpone them.
Having the family (often only parents) around and maybe 1-2 friends from time to time is vastly different from a class of 20-30 pupils.
Also remember that the summer holidays you mention don't disappear. They additionally increase the time of separation. Especially this year where a lot of families won't go on vacation as usual.
I think there's some schools that are doing a real cost-benefit analysis. It's going to be a gigantic, overbearing social problem when we get to 2022 and realize all the most disadvantaged students are a year behind. I know many people don't think that's worth the cost, but you have to acknowledge that some decisionmakers do.
The schools that opened up, did minimial distancing, and then shut down because they detected cases? Yeah, they were clearly in the wishful thinking camp.
It's wishful thinking about how it will turn out (clearly it's not working out like people wanted) with a lot of magical thinking, and political expediency. The economy is hurting, and if you are a leading politician, you want the economy to improve, for people to see there is an end in sight and that we can go back to normal. All these motivations can be true at the same time.
America is so polarized and so many stupid people are convinced that there's some political basis behind the fact that masks prevent spreading, that the US won't be able to just recover from this until we have some combination of effective treatment and/or vaccines. We'll continue to have a lot of big cities, mostly liberal places probably, where people try to distance and wear masks (but not enough). Magical thinking won't make this go away, unlike a lot of other things that you can wish away or ignore when you are in a really rich country.
This study does not prove that children are more infectious.
The paper only tested for viral RNA, not for infectious virus. Given that some people are clinically recovered but still have RNA in the throat, and that presence of viral RNA may not equate with live virus (see a Nature paper from two months ago), this is a rather severe limitation.
Note that they may as well be: but you can't infer this from these results.
Exactly. The paper itself concludes somewhat softer that "children may be a potential source of contagion in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in spite of milder disease or lack of symptoms"
The patient group consisted of "children ... presenting to urgent care clinics or being hospitalized for confirmed/suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children", so they are pre-selected , making the role of the full amount of children in the population in spreading harder to know.
It's baffling to me that there has ever been much of a question over whether kids can get and spread the virus to begin with.
Many people seem to have taken the "kids are less impacted when infected" and converted it to a "kids can't get infected" or "kids don't spread the virus" conclusion.
The provincial government where I live was recently excoriated for coming up with one of the weakest back-to-school plans in the country, which effectively suggested the status quo with next to no supports or funding for schools to deal with COVID-19 unless and until outbreaks start occurring.
From what I can tell based on the policy and subsequent public statements made by the officials, they seemed to have been operating under the assumption that kids can't be infected or are less likely to be infected with COVID-19.
The lack of critical thinking on display when it comes to this virus, especially by policymakers, is one of the most disturbing facets of this pandemic. I really get the impression that many are not putting in an effort to maintain even a baseline level of up to date knowledge on this evolving situation. It's distressing when you see people espousing opinion based on outdated information from 4 months ago.
Was there really a question? Or did our policymakers start from the required conclusion - the peasantry go back to work - and from there infer backwards to "their children need to go back to school so that said peasantry can go back to work"?
With that kind of thinking, I can understand that they don't actually have any idea about the transmission of Covid amongst children; they don't need that information as it has little bearing on the required conclusion.
I have presented something of a leading question. I know what I think the answer is.
I don't think it's just the government, at least based on what I see in e.g. Germany.
Society has decided that kids have to go back to school because anything else is just too inconvenient. The lame excuses about lower transmission rates and the risk of developmental impairment are conveniently put forward to justify the decision.
From what I see in my own children, depression and developmental impairment are not fabricated risks. I’m not saying they outweigh greater public health concerns regarding the spread of the disease but the worries I have for my kids if the next school year is entirely remote go entirely beyond personal inconvenience. There are sadly no perfect solutions here.
Any parent of school age children knows that almost every cold you catch comes from your kids, who spend their time at daycare passing around the same toy and each putting it in their mouth. A few come from the workplace, but most from kids. Covid is not a superflu, it’s a supercold, and there’s no a priori reason to expect that you can’t catch it from your kids.
If I read correctly the they're saying they found that children have higher viral loads in their respiratory tracts. They are then making a very logical leap to assuming that this means children will more easily spread the virus. Is it possible that this assumption could be wrong? Are there no studies on the actual transmission rates from children to others vs that from adults?
> If I read correctly the they're saying they found that children have higher viral loads in their respiratory tracts
As I wrote elsewhere in the comments, the researchers have equated the quantity of viral RNA with viral load. Studies in adults have shown that this is not always the case. There's no guarantee that there is active virus there (unless you try to infect cells with what you got from the swab).
I think the rationale is that the primary way SARSCOV2 is spread is via droplets in the air. The most effective way of doing that is coughing and sneezing, i.e. being symptomatic of a respiratory infection. Children are generally asymptomatic with SC2 and likely remain infected for shorter time frames as SC2 never really gets a strong foothold. These factors make the spreading of SC2 from children likely.
My theory is that there's cross immunity to other coronaviruses. This is now supported by molecular research but it's been my hypothesis all along. Basically little kids are so exposed to so many other coronaviruses they have greater immunity to sars-cov-2.
I've had this prediction I'd like to test with the right data that parents of young children, and those that work with them, have lower covid rates than demographically matched controls.
Ironically this would suggest that socially distancing kids might decrease immunity in the long run.
Children were always thought to spread the virus like with influenza virus. That's why all schools closed.
But the problem was that kids under 10 turned out to be not affected in numbers. People still thought that it is dangerous for or with kids. Statistics worldwide didn't support that.
The picture is now a bit clearer, that kids just belong to the huge group of asymptotic cases dealing with the common cold as every year.
The potential to infect older people is still disputed. Current studies clearly dismiss that. Only the press and politicians are fascinated by that idea. The biggest COVID-19 spreaders are still young women at around 30, unlike with the influenza.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 85.6 ms ] threadThis is true for many subjects of interest (e.g. climate change), but of importance are the quality of the studies and where scientific consensus is going.
As it is, I'm left thinking that science is built on limited understanding, stating only what the evidence to hand supports, and that the problem with the understanding of the general public is that they want certainty now when there are only more questions and areas to research for now.
Research should not extrapolate far beyond what can be proven, regardless of how the result is filtered and distorted by consumers of social media.
No it doesn't. In the first paragraph it says:
> The infected children were shown to have a significantly higher level of virus in their airways than hospitalized adults in ICUs for COVID-19 treatment, according to Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Mass General Hospital for Children (MGHfC).
So they SHOWED in patients that it DOES have higher viral load. First paragraph.
The second paragraph contradicts your reading further:
> The study, “Pediatric SARS-CoV-2: Clinical Presentation, Infectivity, and Immune Reponses,” was published today in The Journal of Pediatrics.
> “I was surprised by the high levels of virus we found in children of all ages, especially in the first two days of infection,” says Lael Yonker, director of the
Saying "clinical" here is a bit of wishful thinking. Clinical testing would mean random selection and random assignment in a medical experiment for kids. With an adverse hypothesis.
From a national perspective of producing competitive individuals in an increasingly international landscape? Yes, they do. They need at least a few hours of their day coached by an institution to direct their energies towards their studies.
Otherwise Khan Academy would already solve 85% of the problems, because it is closely aligned to state curricula.
Note that the median teenager (or lower), while possibly college-bound, is not really qualified for college and is not very academically inclined. Also note that they are decidedly not middle class or higher. They are constantly pushing and testing boundaries without the received wisdom to know when they have gone too far.
One of my biggest criticisms of modern day K-12 education, especially high school, is that it is mostly glorified baby sitting given the low amount of learning that takes place at the lower-end schools. The high school curriculum that we use today is roughly based on the same curriculum from late 1800s to early 1900s when only about 6% of people graduated from high school, and pretty much all of them went to college or a two-year school of some sort. High school was specifically designed to cater to college bound students.
A variant of this curriculum is used today even though approximately half of college-age students don’t go to college (including most high school dropouts). The curricular mismatch is a joke, and the only real reason high school can be justified for these students is, unfortunately, tax-funded babysitting.
At that age you're fully capable of staying home by yourself and following online instruction, at minimum.
It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other useless activities.
Disclaimer: this obviously varies from country to country.
The same politic groups, that would argue that teachers are the heroes of society that we can't live without, are now arguing that school must under no circumstance resume. We must indefinitely put off in-person schooling.
What? Is this the best we can do? Does this even measure up with scientific reality and risk calculation? Are teachers really that simultaneously important/unimportant? If the grocery baggers are working and handling the crisis well enough, so should teachers. It's clear that there's a class element to "essential worker." And this entire profession that seems to love the praise they generally receive from the left about how indispensable they are, are now suspiciously absent from the essential worker category.
You can only conclude that the social and mental development of children isn't essential.
If they cared enough, they'd use this crisis as an opportunity to start hiring younger teachers in droves to build up the workforce with relatively inexperienced teachers who aren't at much risk from the virus (at least compared to some 50-60yo teacher). But I suspect unions would stop at nothing to impede adaptive, efficient, and creative solutions.
If there were a real plan in place to ensure safety, and if adults were willing to sacrifice in other areas like going out to bars then school could work if we had consistent isolated groups.
As it stands, at least in Ontario, there's been a strong push to "open up" bars and restaurants etc which to me is public mixing incompatible with the mixing of students in a class. Pick one: school or everything else.
But you're not owning up to the possible irreparable damage to children's psyche, mental wellbeing, career prospects, etc.
At least be honest about the tradeoffs. If I'm saying that people are overestimating risk and people will blame me for associated mortality and effects of the disease, it's like the other side of the debate is never that open and explicit about the very serious drawbacks and costs of their choices.
Let's be fair to both sides: you're responsible for suicides, health effects of prolonged isolation, etc.
That will be the case if they continue school.
> Let's be fair to both sides: you're responsible for suicides, health effects of prolonged isolation, etc.
With that logic you are personally responsible for suicides, health effects of bullying and school slavery, etc.
> and people will blame me for associated mortality and effects of the disease
I do not think that blaming people for expressing their opinion will be worth much to the family who just lost one of its members. It is cheap for you to accept blame and worthless to these that suffer due to following the same belief.
You're also misinformed about the risks to young people. An unknown amount of mild courses (I've read about estimates of 10%) result in long-term damage, just like with SARS. These people are called COVID long-haulers.
Somehow kids are able to survive summer holidays or home schooling without grave developmental consequences.
This is purely about economic consequences and it's a calculated risk that the outbreaks in schools will be able to be contained without having to shut down the entire educational system again and forcing families to both work and take care of their kids.
Having the family (often only parents) around and maybe 1-2 friends from time to time is vastly different from a class of 20-30 pupils.
Also remember that the summer holidays you mention don't disappear. They additionally increase the time of separation. Especially this year where a lot of families won't go on vacation as usual.
No, absolutely not.
You can say the lockdown might not be "emotionally" healthy. But it seems it has been healthy in a more literal sense.
The schools that opened up, did minimial distancing, and then shut down because they detected cases? Yeah, they were clearly in the wishful thinking camp.
America is so polarized and so many stupid people are convinced that there's some political basis behind the fact that masks prevent spreading, that the US won't be able to just recover from this until we have some combination of effective treatment and/or vaccines. We'll continue to have a lot of big cities, mostly liberal places probably, where people try to distance and wear masks (but not enough). Magical thinking won't make this go away, unlike a lot of other things that you can wish away or ignore when you are in a really rich country.
The paper only tested for viral RNA, not for infectious virus. Given that some people are clinically recovered but still have RNA in the throat, and that presence of viral RNA may not equate with live virus (see a Nature paper from two months ago), this is a rather severe limitation.
Note that they may as well be: but you can't infer this from these results.
The patient group consisted of "children ... presenting to urgent care clinics or being hospitalized for confirmed/suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children", so they are pre-selected , making the role of the full amount of children in the population in spreading harder to know.
As you note, that doesnt rule it out either.
So I feel this is a wasted opportunity.
Many people seem to have taken the "kids are less impacted when infected" and converted it to a "kids can't get infected" or "kids don't spread the virus" conclusion.
The provincial government where I live was recently excoriated for coming up with one of the weakest back-to-school plans in the country, which effectively suggested the status quo with next to no supports or funding for schools to deal with COVID-19 unless and until outbreaks start occurring.
From what I can tell based on the policy and subsequent public statements made by the officials, they seemed to have been operating under the assumption that kids can't be infected or are less likely to be infected with COVID-19.
The lack of critical thinking on display when it comes to this virus, especially by policymakers, is one of the most disturbing facets of this pandemic. I really get the impression that many are not putting in an effort to maintain even a baseline level of up to date knowledge on this evolving situation. It's distressing when you see people espousing opinion based on outdated information from 4 months ago.
With that kind of thinking, I can understand that they don't actually have any idea about the transmission of Covid amongst children; they don't need that information as it has little bearing on the required conclusion.
I have presented something of a leading question. I know what I think the answer is.
Society has decided that kids have to go back to school because anything else is just too inconvenient. The lame excuses about lower transmission rates and the risk of developmental impairment are conveniently put forward to justify the decision.
As I wrote elsewhere in the comments, the researchers have equated the quantity of viral RNA with viral load. Studies in adults have shown that this is not always the case. There's no guarantee that there is active virus there (unless you try to infect cells with what you got from the swab).
The best study I'm aware of suggests an age-dependent effect, with older kids infecting others at about the adult rate, but young kids causing very little secondary infection: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-childr...
This virus would have to be unlike any other respiratory virus for young kids not to infect others.
I've had this prediction I'd like to test with the right data that parents of young children, and those that work with them, have lower covid rates than demographically matched controls.
Ironically this would suggest that socially distancing kids might decrease immunity in the long run.
But the problem was that kids under 10 turned out to be not affected in numbers. People still thought that it is dangerous for or with kids. Statistics worldwide didn't support that.
The picture is now a bit clearer, that kids just belong to the huge group of asymptotic cases dealing with the common cold as every year.
The potential to infect older people is still disputed. Current studies clearly dismiss that. Only the press and politicians are fascinated by that idea. The biggest COVID-19 spreaders are still young women at around 30, unlike with the influenza.