New study shows the huge role children play in spreading Covid

[Worriedmum999]

Biggest study so far on the role of children in spreading Covid has come out today. Surely this has massive implications on children going back to school as normal. It’s very concerning. news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/08/looking-at-children-as-the-silent-spreaders-of-sars-cov-2/

Is there anything else happening in the world ffs?

Challenge is limiting spread from kids to vulnerable adults.
People are clever & can figure out how to do that.

That’s wonderful! Will they figure it out before term starts?

@ExmoorPony

Is there anything else happening in the world ffs?

Nope. All Covid. Just wait a few months, though, there will be no-deal Brexit and it will all really hit the fan!

@HipTightOnions

Challenge is limiting spread from kids to vulnerable adults. People are clever & can figure out how to do that.

That’s wonderful! Will they figure it out before term starts?

It already has in Scotland, for over a week.

Do you not understand what articles like this are saying?

Schools will not be able to stay open full time for everyone. A few children will get ill. The children sitting next to them will have to stay at home for 2 weeks. The staff may get ill and the 'bubble' may need to close. If all goes well everyone will return. Another child will get ill. The children sitting next to them will have to stay at home for 2 weeks. The staff may get ill and the 'bubble' may need to close. If all goes well everyone will return. Another child will get ill...and so on.

It will be disruptive at best and disastrous at worse but it will not be full time schooling for everyone. Children isolating at home will have little support because there is no planning for this. No one wants schools to shut but insisting on the current plan will lead to this happening.

I do sympathise with the shielding. It must be incredibly scary to go from one day being told you have to stay inside and can't even go for a walk, or you might get a horrible virus and die, to the next day that you can go back to mixing with lots of people. I do, absolutely get that.

However, I do honestly believe that people have lost sense of the actual risk of getting coronavirus, let alone the risk of dying from it. On 14th August the ONS estimated that in England there were around 0.69 new COVID infections for every 10,000 people in the community during the week 3-9th August. Now, I am no maths genius, but that seems to me a pretty low chance of actually getting coronavirus. Let alone actually dying from it if you did get it. People die. They get killed by cars, and by viruses, and by other people. Unfortunately we can't shield ourselves from all risk.

How would a safer secondary school look?

If James in Y10 isn't in school, where is he? The sibling risks are the same... Siblings are unavoidable...

In a streamed school you could probably have stream bubbles (for students). Before options you could keep students in classes rather than setting but as soon as you have options the only practical bubble is year groups. Or subject choice bubbles where choices are limited...

Part time schooling in theory seems like a good idea, but depends on the students (and parents) to behave responsibly when not in school...

The only vaguely sensible option I can see is for parents who want to to be able
to choose to keep kids at home without risk of penalties/loss of school place. Beyond that would require facilities and planning far beyond the competence of our current government.

Scotland at least have a properly worked up fall back plan...

I do think the UK could do more by way of precautions. I live overseas and there are a set of measures that schools have to meet before they are allowed to open for in person learning. Things like air filtration systems, ppe for staff etc. Kids will remain in one class and not move around hallways and staff will come to them. No communal spaces such as cafeterias or gymnasiums are open. Lunch is brought from home and eaten in the classroom. Parents also have the option to do fully remote learning and classes will be live streamed.

Someone asked about long term side effects. This from one of the best hospitals in the USA.
www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/Clinical-and-sociodemographic-features-of-early-covid-19-patients-in-massachusetts-mgh-study-suggests-vulnerable-populations-are-hardest-hit?fbclid=IwAR0KugkfBVJk6O4SVLgyfLsO7-wyXMPVJV5Oo8IsYHND9oI2v0ZQ_RfnlpI

We could do so much more to protect them but the Uk attitude seems to be fuck it. Secondary students could wear masks so could ks2. If other countries can do it so can we. They can rejig the number contacts each kid has. It's about minimising the risk not eliminating it. This attitude of if you have any contacts you might as well give up and throw them all in together is plain lazy and dangerous.

The schools should all have had hybrid models plans in place by now but they don't. And when the numbers sky rocket we will all end up in lockdown again without adaquate remote provision. It's ludicrous.

I know of 4 schools already that have had to close again in Scotland

@Clive222

I know of 4 schools already that have had to close again in Scotland

Where are those? The only one I heard about where the whole school closed was the special school in Dundee, which is an outbreak of 8 adults so far.

Masks do what they do. I think their potential benefit around the minority of irresponsible teenagers is limited, my opinion...

The issue is that the higher risk students are those with the most complicated time tables. Especially those in Y11 and 13 who are half way through their courses so it would be considered wrong to say, tough we can only teach you if you do either Maths Physics Chemistry or French Geography Biology or History English Economics. Choose your set of subjects and catch up as best you can...

GCSEs could be made uniform I guess. Everyone does English X 2, Maths, Double Science, arbitrary school assignment (by class/bubble) of history/geography, arbitrary assignment of language, RE and an arbitrary assignment of Art, Music, Drama, Dance, PE, Home EC/Technology by bubble/ class...

Most other countries don't offer the same level of specialisation at 14, which is why whole year bubbles will be problem.

Increasing distancing would be good. Increasing distancing by leaving irresponsible teenagers (doesn't take more than 1 to burst a bubble) to "work" at home might well be less effective than keeping kids in school...

Note I'm not saying all teenagers are irresponsible, but I would argue that enough are to cause risks, unless we can have robust exclusion options...

I know of 4 schools already that have had to close again in Scotland

How many have stayed open? I should imagine it's a fair few more.

I am not at all surprised to hear this 😔

Expert reaction to study claiming children are silent spreaders of SARS-CoV-2

A study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics*, has claimed that children are silent spreaders of SARS-CoV-2.

Prof Adilia Warris, Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Exeter, said:

“The data presented here does not support the claim that children are silent spreaders of COVID-19.

“The authors do show that children who presented with respiratory symptoms during this pandemic, and who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, displayed viral loads comparable to adult hospitalized patients, especially in the first two days of symptoms. Interestingly, of the children presenting with symptoms, only around 28 per cent of children tested positive, and of these, more than 60 per cent were over the age of 11, 26 per cent were obese (with less than 10 per cent in the non SARS-CoV-2 group), and exposure to the virus was by either mum or dad (77 per cent), supporting a larger role for adults in the transmission of this virus.

“The study was not designed to assess risk of transmission. Although a high viral load contributes to the level of contagiousness, it is not the only factor playing a role. The study was performed in children presenting and/or admitted to hospital, which we know is different from children presenting to community practices, and therefore the conclusions and translations the authors make with respect to schools is in my opinion too far-reaching, and is not supported by the data they present.”

Dr Simon Clarke, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology at the University of Reading, said:

“In my opinion the headline of the press release is very misleading, because the study does not actually demonstrate that children spread the virus.

“It is already fairly well documented that children do indeed contract the coronavirus causing Covid-19 and that they produce it in large quantities. However it is less clear how much infection they cause in others or how their age may influence that. This study only adds to our understanding of the extent of infection in children, but not the spread of Covid-19. It does not demonstrate, in any way, that children actually spread of the virus to adults or other children.”

Dr Andrew Preston, Reader in Microbial Pathogenesis at the University of Bath, said:

“In my opinion many of the statements in this paper are largely unfounded.

“The authors conclude that children can carry high levels of virus in their airways, even though displaying mild symptoms. They argue that children present a risk of transmitting the infection to others, which would be of great concern when considering the re-opening of schools.

“However, that is very misleading because the study was limited to symptomatic children. It is recognised that symptomatic individuals likely pose a greater risk of transmission than asymptomatic individuals. The discussion appears to suggest children in general will be walking around with high viral loads, when in fact this study was limited to small numbers of children with symptoms. Those displaying symptoms would be isolating, not walking around in schools.

“It is recognised that there could be a period before symptoms develop when a child might be shedding virus, but the low numbers of children who display disease means this would be relatively rare. The study does not include any appraisal of the transmissibility of the virus in the children studied, which is a significant weakness.

“The measurement of viral load in the respiratory tract detected viral RNA, not viral particles, so it is not clear that the high levels detected would equate to high infectivity.

“The study is a valuable contribution to the study of COVID-19 in children, but the paper makes some bold claims regarding the role of children as silent spreaders of the COVID-19 virus. Without studies of transmission, and while focused only on symptomatic children who are a minority of the whole children cohort, these claims are largely unfounded.”

• ‘Pediatric SARS-CoV-2: Clinical Presentation, Infectivity, and Immune Responses’ by Lael M. Yonker et al. was published in the Journal of Pediatrics on Thursday 20 August 2020.

DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2020.08.037

From: www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-claiming-children-are-silent-spreaders-of-sars-cov-2/

@lonelyplanet

Do you not understand what articles like this are saying?

Schools will not be able to stay open full time for everyone. A few children will get ill. The children sitting next to them will have to stay at home for 2 weeks. The staff may get ill and the 'bubble' may need to close. If all goes well everyone will return. Another child will get ill. The children sitting next to them will have to stay at home for 2 weeks. The staff may get ill and the 'bubble' may need to close. If all goes well everyone will return. Another child will get ill...and so on.

It will be disruptive at best and disastrous at worse but it will not be full time schooling for everyone. Children isolating at home will have little support because there is no planning for this. No one wants schools to shut but insisting on the current plan will lead to this happening.

But if the measures we are taking in the community continue to be effective- masks in shops, no large events, staying at home with symptoms, test&trace - and the community levels stay at a few cases per 100,000 like they are now then this scenario you describe is very unlikely. All these children sequentially catching this one after the other in an unrelated way (not an outbreak). All this constant closing people are predicting should only happen if the community rates have rocketed again which they shouldn't now with much better controls in place.

My dc are back in School (Scotland) eldest said on day 2 that sanitisers were damaged by the younger pupils or empty as they were squirting them for fun, which isn’t very promising.

@CoffeeandCroissant -Thanks for that - so basically the research does not say what the covid nuts upthread claim it does. The anxious mums army does not have the skills to analyse this data properly and will make up the narrative that suits them. Shocker.

@lonelyplanet

Do you not understand what articles like this are saying?

Schools will not be able to stay open full time for everyone. A few children will get ill. The children sitting next to them will have to stay at home for 2 weeks. The staff may get ill and the 'bubble' may need to close. If all goes well everyone will return. Another child will get ill. The children sitting next to them will have to stay at home for 2 weeks. The staff may get ill and the 'bubble' may need to close. If all goes well everyone will return. Another child will get ill...and so on.

It will be disruptive at best and disastrous at worse but it will not be full time schooling for everyone. Children isolating at home will have little support because there is no planning for this. No one wants schools to shut but insisting on the current plan will lead to this happening.

No @lonelyplanet. That is not what that article is saying. Please don’t try to summarise scientific papers if you don’t have the ability to understand and interpret the data. Fine to say, in my opinion, this is what might happen in a worst case scenario. But please don’t pretend to be able to provide accurate overviews when you obviously don’t have the capability.

Holyrivolli - I didn't summerise a scientific paper I was commenting on an news article based on research and posted by the OP which states:

“This study provides much-needed facts for policymakers to make the best decisions possible for schools, daycare centers and other institutions that serve children,” says Fasano. “Kids are a possible source of spreading this virus, and this should be taken into account in the planning stages for reopening schools.”

Cases are low in my area, and schools are probably reasonably safe ATM. However in the Manchester area they are not so low. This will be a worry for the parents of vulnerable children and for many school staff. I am shocked by the total lack of empathy on here by a few posters.

@Worriedmum999

I read it carefully and it doesn't show that children spread, just that they CAN carry a high viral load when they have it. Interestingly, these healthy children didn't have many effects which is great for people who are particularly worried about effects of SARS on children.

Another study published in the last week states 'Compared to adults, children with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have
mild or asymptomatic infection, but the underlying immunological differences remain unclear. We
describe clinical features, virology, longitudinal cellular and cytokine immune prole, SARS-CoV-2-specic
serology and salivary antibody responses in a family of two parents with PCR-conrmed symptomatic
SARS-CoV-2 infection and their three children, who were repeatedly SARS-CoV-2 PCR negative' So in that study the parents had it and the 3 children living with them didn't. assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-47021/v1/86493864-1652-4d70-9e8f-3bdb06ac2333.pdf

There are so many studies now and you can search for one that suits your agenda quite easily. It's the majority of studies that count.

I get that many people are really scared of schools reopening. The balance of risk suggests that the vast majority of children are pretty safe and need social interaction and education. The vast majority of adults also have a low risk of serious complications. I imagine you could also say that since so many of the children studied had it already.... perhaps not again.... it might be that the numbers of individuals in the population that have had it is underestimated.... who knows we didn't test.... it might explain the fall in numbers now despite the constant predictions of second wave

Maybe continue with the lock downs in areas of high transmissions. Then leave the areas of low number of cases to educate children in schools?

[quote ineedaholidaynow]@ExmoorPony if a person was at risk of being very poorly if they contracted the virus in March/April so were put on the shielding list, does this mean that now they are no longer shielding if they get the virus the risk of them being very poorly is nil? Can’t you understand why people are concerned?[/quote]
I seem to remember back in February where there was thought to be a few cases in the community.. that escalated quickly and will likely escalate again....