Adults who lived with children during the pandemic’s second wave were only slightly more at risk of Covid-19 than those who lived without them, suggesting school attendance has minimal impact on infection rates, a new study has found.
While there was a small increased risk of infection and hospitalisation for those aged 65 and under who lived with school-aged children between September and December last year, they were no more likely to be admitted to intensive care or die than those who lived without children.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the British Medical Journal, found no evidence of a noticeably increased risk of infection during the first wave in the UK between February and August, compared to those adults who do not live with children.
Age Groups
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Important points from this report include:
- A seven-year-old experienced a stroke.
- One child and one infant suffered facial paralysis.
- One infant had a kidney adverse event, either kidney injury or failure.
- Of the 34 cases, 24 (71%) were classified as serious.
- Predominantly female patients were affected — at least 25 of 34 (73.5%) patients.
- Table 6 reports 34 cases of use in pediatric individuals. However, 28 additional cases were excluded because details such as height and weight were “not consistent with pediatric subjects.”
- Ages ranged from two months to nine years, with median 4.0 years, which means half the children were under four years of age.
- 132 adverse events were reported in the 34 children – i.e., an average of 3.88 AEs per child.
Summary from Daily Clout journalists:
Germany has recommended the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine should only be given to people under the age of 65, according to reports.
The country’s vaccine committee has reportedly said the jab, developed alongside the University of Oxford, should only be offered to people aged between 18 and 64.
It gave a lack of sufficient data on the effectiveness of the inoculation in older people as the reason for the decision in a draft recommendation.
Analysis of the age profile of Covid infections, however, does not point to schools being especially important in the early-stage growth of the second wave. Although the report does also observe that ‘school closures can contribute to a reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission’.
But had schools played a big role you would expect to have seen a sharp increase in cases among children of school age a week or two following the return to the classroom. Instead, the ECDC noted that Europe’s second wave began with a sharp increase in cases among 19 to 39 year olds in mid August. Cases among 16 to 18 year olds also increased around this time, but the curve of infections among younger children rose much more gradually, in step with infection rates in the over-40s.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-role-do-schools-play-in-the-spread-of-covid-19-
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
- German researchers enrolled nearly 2,500 parents and their children in a study
- Found three times as many adults had coronavirus antibodies than children
- Data also shows a previously infected adult and an uninfected child was 4.3 times more common than a previously infected child and an uninfected parent
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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Mirror archives are available below if this video is removed from YouTube.
Almost three times as many under 60s died in road crashes last year as those without health conditions killed by coronavirus, NHS data shows.
Just 388 people under the age of 60 with no underlying health conditions have died of coronavirus in England, NHS data has revealed.
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.
- Only 17 people under 40 died with Covid between the end of August and the middle of this month.
- Increased infections among children and young adults has not led to their hospitalisations or deaths.
- One person under the age of 20, and another 13 under 40, have died with coronavirus in English hospitals since the start of September.
- 1,425 patients over 80 have died over the same period, along with another 1,093 aged between 60 and 79.
- 247 deaths among working-age people since the end of summer compared with 2,026 among pensioners
- Instead of indiscriminate rules, we should be concentrating on protecting the vulnerable.
- The rest should be allowed to get on with normal life and acquire some natural immunity.
- The Government’s policy is founded upon a great lie — that we are all vulnerable to Covid so it is necessary to take over the lives of everyone.
- For healthy people under 60 the symptoms are usually mild or non-existent.
- About 90 per cent of deaths have been of people aged over 70. Most are in their 80s or 90s.
- Infections don’t matter a row of beans unless they lead to hospitalisations or deaths.
- Out of nearly 43,000 dead with Covid-19, just 41 have been under 25.
- What we are seeing now…is the first spike…which has come back to hit us. Just as their advisers told them it would, back in February and March.
- So why are Johnson and his crew doubling down on failure? This is about covering politicians’ backs.
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.
- Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.
- Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
- We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young.
- COVID-19 is less dangerous for children than many other harms, including influenza.
- All populations will eventually reach herd immunity.
- Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
- Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19.
- Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.
- Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.
- Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.
- Restaurants and other businesses should open.
- Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume.
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.
- The national debt: £36 billion borrowed last month [August] alone.
- The national debt: Our overall figure of more than £2 trillion is the biggest ever recorded, and will take at least two generations to pay off. Redundancy looms for millions.
- Of the 52,514 virus deaths registered by the Office for National Statistics, 89 per cent have been over-65s.
- More than 22,000 over-85s have died, as well as some 17,000 aged between 75 and 84.
- Only 314 people under the age of 40 have died of the disease since March.
- NHS England figures show that more than 95 per cent of patients who die from coronavirus in hospital have an underlying health condition, such as diabetes, heart disease or obesity.
- New report estimates that there will be a total of 74,000 deaths over the next five years due to the long-term financial and health impact of the pandemic.
- Oncologists warn of an extra 30,000 deaths from cancers currently going undiagnosed.
- Dr John Lee: COVID-19 is currently killing fewer than 40 of the 1,600 people who die every day in the UK.
- There were 2,000 extra deaths from strokes and heart attacks this summer.
Life expectancy at birth in the UK in 2017 to 2019 was 79.4 years for males and 83.1 years for females; slight improvements were observed from 2016 to 2018 of 6.3 weeks and 7.3 weeks for males and females respectively.
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