The low seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in young children in this study may indicate that they do not play a key role in SARS-CoV-2 spreading during the current pandemic.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2775656
Browse the articles related to this topic below.
The low seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in young children in this study may indicate that they do not play a key role in SARS-CoV-2 spreading during the current pandemic.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2775656
Children are unlikely to have played a significant role in the spread of coronavirus during the first wave last year, a study shows.
Throughout the pandemic it has become increasingly evident children are less affected by Covid-19; symptoms, severe disease and death figures in children are all much lower than would be expected when compared to the rest of the population.
Figures from Public Health England (PHE) show the current risk of dying from coronavirus if infected is 1,513 per 100,000 people for over-80s, but for children aged five to nine, this is just 0.1 per 100,000.
Ivor Cummins aka the Fat Emperor – gives James the lowdown on why you can’t trust anything our governments tell us about Covid-19. If you want the facts on Coronavirus – how deadly is it? do lockdowns and masks work? how does it compare with previous pandemics? – you’ve come to the right place
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ONLY 388 people aged under 60 without underlying health conditions have died of coronavirus in hospitals across England, NHS data shows.
The figure is just 0.8 per cent of all Covid fatalities recorded in English hospitals between April 2 and December 23.
Children represented 1.1% (1,408/129,704) of SARS-CoV-2 positive cases between 16 January 2020 and 3 May 2020. In total, 540 305 people were tested for SARS-COV-2 and 129,704 (24.0%) were positive. In children aged <16 years, 35,200 tests were performed and 1408 (4.0%) were positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 19.1%–34.9% adults. Childhood cases increased from mid-March and peaked on 11 April before declining. Among 2,961 individuals presenting with ARI in primary care, 351 were children and 10 (2.8%) were positive compared with 9.3%–45.5% in adults. Eight children died and four (case-fatality rate, 0.3%; 95% CI 0.07% to 0.7%) were due to COVID-19. We found no evidence of excess mortality in children.
Children accounted for a very small proportion of confirmed cases despite the large numbers of children tested. SARS-CoV-2 positivity was low even in children with ARI. Our findings provide further evidence against the role of children in infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201124224223if_/https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/12/1180
This is an archive of a series of Tweets by Bob Moran, cartoonist for The Telegraph. It has been formatted for readability but otherwise kept intact.
Bob Moran is an award-winning cartoonist. He has worked for The Daily Telegraph since 2011. In 2017, Bob was named Political Cartoonist of the Year by the Cartoon Arts Trust and in 2018 became The Telegraph’s lead cartoonist.
The choice we have been presented with from the beginning is a false one. The government says – and most people seem to believe – that we must choose between sacrificing freedoms and livelihoods or letting thousands of people die.
This is not, and has never been, the choice. The reality has always been that a lot of people were going to die this year (though possibly no more than any other year). The choice we had to make was between two groups of people; if we let one live, the other would possibly die.
The first group of people is, almost exclusively, very old people who are already very sick, with an average age which exceeds the average life expectancy. The size of this group is around 20,000 – that is the number we hope to save, although in this context, ‘save’ really means delaying their imminent death by a few months.
The second group of people consists of all ages with a much, much younger average age and contains children and newborn babies. This group numbers at least 200,000 but is probably a lot bigger. The loss of life, therefore, is huge.
Every decision taken has been about making this choice, between these two groups. As a society, we were presented with an opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of the value of life, the preservation and protection of the young and our adherence to moral principles.
And we chose the wrong group. We chose to let the much larger group of much younger people die and, just to make it even more wicked, we did it without any certainty that we would ‘save’ anybody in the first group.
This decision shames us all. It will scar us for generations.
We have made the wrong choice and now, we’ve done it a second time. The people who support lockdown, who wear masks, who download the app, who get tested, who strain every sinew to make this virus seem frightening, they are declaring that this choice was the right one.
They want this undeniable evil to be the new moral philosophy on which our society is built. There is no longer room for hindsight, no excuses for not understanding what we were doing. It has been clear since April.
This is what I am standing against. The good, kind, decent people who oppose all of this are not whingeing about their own freedoms being taken away, they are not moaning about the ‘inconvenience’ of it all, they are desperately trying to protect our collective sense of good.
Unless you want our children to grow up in a world based on wickedness, stand up to this. Fight it. Reject it. Say, “No.”
At the very least, don’t let there be any doubt as to which side you are on.
Read the original Tweet here.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12886627/lord-sumption-government-death-toll-coronavirus-crisis/
In fact, it is now becoming clear [Lockdown] is simply the wrong policy. Those who dissented from the Government’s Covid-19 strategy have been dismissed as mavericks on the fringes of the scientific establishment. However, this is no longer the case. I am afraid that the broadcast media has been particularly slow to reflect a shift in outlook among international scientists.
https://unherd.com/2020/10/covid-experts-there-is-another-way/
Have we all gone mad, and become so afraid of the virus that we’ve lost the ability to read, to think and to question? You could argue that the fear of Covid-19 has become so all-consuming that it has become even more of a killer than the virus itself.
Dear Prime Minister, Chancellor, CMOs and Chief Scientific Adviser
We are writing with the intention of providing constructive input into the choices with respect to the Covid-19 policy response. We also have several concerns regarding aspects of the existing policy choices that we wish to draw attention to.
In summary, our view is that the existing policy path is inconsistent with the known risk-profile of Covid-19 and should be reconsidered. The unstated objective currently appears to be one of suppression of the virus, until such a time that a vaccine can be deployed. This objective is increasingly unfeasible (notwithstanding our more specific concerns regarding existing policies) and is leading to significant harm across all age groups, which likely offsets any benefits.
Instead, more targeted measures that protect the most vulnerable from Covid, whilst not adversely impacting those not at risk, are more supportable. Given the high proportion of Covid deaths in care homes, these should be a priority. Such targeted measures should be explored as a matter of urgency, as the logical cornerstone of our future strategy.
In addition to this overarching point, we append a set of concerns regarding the existing policy choices, which we hope will be received in the spirit in which they are intended. We are mindful that the current circumstances are challenging, and that all policy decisions are difficult ones. Moreover, many people have sadly lost loved ones to Covid-19 throughout the UK. Nonetheless, the current debate appears unhelpfully polarised around views that Covid is extremely deadly to all (and that large-scale policy interventions are effective); and on the other hand, those who believe Covid poses no risk at all. In light of this, and in order to make choices that increase our prospects of achieving better outcomes in future, we think now is the right time to ‘step back’ and fundamentally reconsider the path forward.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Sunetra Gupta; Professor of theoretical epidemiology, the University of Oxford
Professor Carl Heneghan; Director, Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, the University of Oxford
Professor Karol Sikora; Consultant oncologist and Professor of medicine, University of Buckingham
Sam Williams; Director and co-founder of Economic Insight
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-needs-to-rethink-his-covid-strategy
Britain is now in grave danger of sleepwalking into a second national lockdown. The consequences of doing so would be disastrous.
We find ourselves in this wretched position partly because the Government’s main achievement since the pandemic first emerged in China has not been suppressing the virus or saving lives or the economy, but in spreading irrational fear.
Accumulating data on deaths from covid-19 show an association with age that closely matches the “normal” risk we all face. Explaining risk in this way could help people understand and manage their response, says David Spiegelhalter
As covid-19 turns from a societal threat into a matter of risk management, it is vital that the associated risks are understood and clearly communicated.1 But these risks vary hugely between people, and so finding appropriate analogues is a challenge. Although covid-19 is a complex multisystem disease that can cause prolonged illness, here I focus solely on the risks of dying from covid-19 and explore the use of “normal” risk—the risk of death from all causes each year—as an aid to transparent communication.
When the postmortem is done on the media’s coverage of COVID-19 (and it will be), it will be clear that the virus was no Black Plague — it’s not even the flu on a bad year.
SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, has killed 56,749 Americans as of Tuesday.
That’s not good. But it’s not as bad as the 2017-2018 flu season, when 80,000 -plus perished. And it’s a long cry from what all the experts were warning about just a few weeks ago: First, they predicted 1.7 million Americans dead; then they redid the models (this time apparently entering a few more “facts”) and said 100,000-240,000 dead.
Fatality rate:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/28/covid-19-turning-out-to-be-huge-hoax-perpetrated-b/
But where did this one percent figure come from? You may find this hard to believe, but this figure emerged by mistake. A pretty major thing to make a mistake about, but that’s what happened.
In order to understand what happened, you have to understand the difference between two medical terms that sound the same – but are completely different. [IFR and CFR.]
CFR will always be far higher than the IFR. With influenza, the CFR is around ten times as high as the IFR. Covid seems to have a similar proportion.
Now, clearly, you do not want to get these figures mixed up. By doing so you would either wildly overestimate, or wildly underestimate, the impact of Covid. But mix these figures up, they did.
…we’ve had all the deaths we were ever going to get. And which also means that lockdown achieved, almost precisely nothing with regard to Covid. No deaths were prevented.
The number of over-50s with Covid-19 represents a fifth of those nationwide
Just three per cent are aged over 80, down from 28 per cent six months ago
Peak age range for infections is now in the 20s but used to be in the 80s
Sparked hope further restrictions could soon be reduced as older people shield
While the testing data are so opaque, using them to direct local lockdowns is unhelpful, argues Heneghan. “The testing is there to drive the test and trace strategy,” he says. “But what seems to be happening is that, as soon as we see an outbreak, there tends to be panic and over-reacting. This is a huge problem because politicians are operating in a non-evidence-based way when it comes to non-drug interventions.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20200904104824/https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3374.full
Our random-sample study estimated 187 802 cumulative infections, to which 180 hospitalizations were added. The average age among all COVID-19 decedents was 76.9 years (SD, 13.1). The overall noninstitutionalized IFR was 0.26%. In order of magnitude, the demographic-stratified IFR varied most by age, race, ethnicity, and sex. Persons younger than 40 years had an IFR of 0.01%; those aged 60 or older had an IFR of 1.71%. Whites had an IFR of 0.18%; non-Whites had an IFR of 0.59%.
By using SARS-CoV-2 population prevalence data, we found that the risk for death among infected persons increased with age. Indiana’s IFR for noninstitutionalized persons older than 60 years is just below 2% (1 in 50). In comparison, the ratio is approximately 2.5 times greater than the estimated IFR for seasonal influenza, 0.8% (1 in 125), among those aged 65 years and older. Of note, the IFR for non-Whites is more than 3 times that for Whites, despite COVID-19 decedents in that group being 5.6 years younger on average.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201003112851/https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-5352