Children and Covid - scary please read

[hippohector]

I hope the link has worked. I just read this Evening Standard news article online.

I realise the government has not given a specific date for schools to reopen yet, but all the speculation seems to suggest the end of May/early June for Primary.

I hope Boris & co will take this into consideration and get all the facts before prematurely reopening schools...

apple.news/AUdpV9de6S8u5tfTleljTaA

It's not 40 out of 2 million. No one knows how many it's out of because we don't know how many children have had Covid.

I find that response repugnant. At the same time we don't know the proportion of children getting this. We need further data before opening schools, without a doubt. Including research into whether this is definitely linked to covid and if it's a new development for the virus. I'm also curious about viral load and the circumstances of infection for the children affected in this way. Are their family members suffering from more serious forms of Covid-19, what is their social and ethnic background. if the risks are higher for some groups of children, we need that data now.

I would also like to see more data on scarring in the lungs for children who have apparently not had a serious form of the disease. The potential for being blind sided because we didn't ask the right questions is enormous frankly.

The potential for being blind sided because we didn't ask the right questions is enormous frankly
Exactly. Well said.

So perhaps the virus has mutated?

But they haven't said that schools will reopen in June have they? Until they announce that schools will re-open I wouldn't worry

It isn’t scary it was always pretty likely that some children would have complications from covid.

Like some have complications from flu (a boy in dd’s class a couple of years ago ended up in picu) and many do from chicken pox, viruses can cause meningitis. We just normally don’t think about it. If you do then life is really really scary.

I have a friend who works in a major London hospital in pediatrics. She said there is also a delay in the onset of the children with the kids presenting to hospital with a variety of conditions ( including the toxic shock type syndrome mentioned in the article) 3 weeks after exposure. This is alot longer then the incubation in adults so we may not be seeing the full story yet.
I am not saying this to scare monger it was just something that came up when I was talking to this person last night. Having said this the risk to children from the disease is negligible compared to risk to elderly and those with health conditions.

I can see both sides to keeping the population at home but also the importance of not completely destroying the economy. I dont envy the people who need to make that decision.

So perhaps the virus has mutated?

The virus has mutated a lot. There are now around 200 different strains continuing to circulate and there's a positive correlation between having a lot of different strains in your country or area and having a high death toll. There is some speculation that having lot of different strains is related to being a busy air traffic hub (London, New York, Tokyo seem to bear that out, for instance).

There is also some evidence that as it mutates in adaptation to human hosts it becomes more transmissible, and also that it may become less amenable to being vaccinated against because the spike protein that most vaccine research is focusing on is changing.

Every time things 'get back to normal' (air traffic, public transport, schools open, free movement in public places) I think there will be a new wave of this virus, until we radically rethink how we go about our business as a species or until there's an effective vaccine.

Why hasn’t this shown up in other countries then?

Or has it?

Ah sorry, I’ve seen that was already discussed