Has anyone seen any new research on anti-bodies in children under 10, and whether they don't get infected or they are not getting ill (=spreaders?)
If it turned out very young kids don't get it, wouldn't it be great.
We do know that the highest risk of death is associated with high blood pressure as an underlying issue.
Children don't tend to get treated for hypertension unless they have some other sort of very serious illness already.
If you also look at other conditions that have been listed as high risk children don't tend to have them.
Many of the high risk conditions are associated with lifestyle and environmental conditions though some people have a genetic tendency to be more likely to develop these conditions too.
Interestingly:
Primary (essential) hypertension
Primary hypertension occurs on its own, without an identifiable cause. This type of high blood pressure occurs more often in older children, generally age 6 and older. The risk factors for developing primary hypertension include:
Being overweight or obese
Having a family history of high blood pressure
Having type 2 diabetes or a high fasting blood sugar level
Having high cholesterol
Eating too much salt
Being black or Hispanic
Being male
Smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke
Being sedentary
Interestingly high blood pressure is associated with high levels of air pollution.
The other fascinating thing I was reading yesterday was about a study on infection rates in a South Korean call centre. They tested everyone in the building and found that those infected were primarily only on one floor and not only that were primarily only on one side of that floor in an enclosed area.
This suggested that contact transmission wasn't particularly effective and that droplet transmission is most common (not aerosol).
After having a conversation with DH he started talking about air conditioning and how that was likely to have an affect. And lo and behold as I scrolled down the twitter comments below the study on the call centre someone had posted a link to a Singapore study on a cluster in a food hall. It turned out that the only people infected in the presence of someone who had it, were those in line with the same air conditioning unit.
Dh thinks that the air conditioning may also provide ideal conditions for the virus surviving longer because they are cold and dry rather than more humid.
And strangely enough whilst composing this message I thought I'd look up blood pressure and air conditioning and what do I see? An association between higher blood pressure and air conditioning...
I think the theory goes that you have more receptor cells to catch covid-19 if you have higher blood pressure. And once you've got it you have more problems because it can spread in your body more easily.
This would also work with the observation of children both catching it less and having less severe responses if they are unfortunate enough to catch it. And children who catch it almost all having serious underlying health conditions to begin with.
Now none of this has been proved and is still very much in the theoretical stage as a hypothesis but there is a certain amount of consistency here which perhaps does lend itself to a theory that should be taken seriously and explored at length.
It's where the whole vascular / respiratory disease thing meets too.