Our vaccine order is turning COVID-19 into a young person's disease

[Celerity]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/04/young-kids-vaccines-covid/618650/



Like many parents, Jason Newland, a paediatrician at Washington University in St. Louis and a dad to three teens ages 19, 17, and 15, now lives in a mixed-vaccination household. His 19-year-old got vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson’s shot two weeks ago and the 17-year-old with Pfizer’s, which is available to teens as young as 16. The 15-year-old is still waiting for her shot, though—a bit impatiently now. “She’s like, ‘Dude, look at me here,’” Newland told me. “‘Why don’t you just tell them I’m 16?’” But because certain pharmaceutical companies set certain age cut-offs for their clinical trial, she alone in her family can’t get a COVID-19 shot. She’s the only one who remains vulnerable. She’s the only one who has to quarantine from all her friends if she gets exposed. In America, adults are racing headlong into a post-vaccination summer while kids are being left in vaccine limbo. Pfizer’s shot is likely to be authorized for ages 12 to 15 in several weeks’ time, but younger kids may have to wait until the fall or even early 2022 as clinical trials run their course. This “age de-escalation” strategy is typical for clinical trials, but it means this confusing period of vaccinated adults and unvaccinated kids will not be over soon. And the pandemic will start to look quite different.

How different? Vaccination is already changing the landscape of COVID-19 risk by age. In the U.S., hospital admissions have fallen dramatically for adults over 70 who were prioritized for vaccines, but they have remained steady—or have even risen slightly—in younger groups that became eligible more recently. This trend is likely to continue as vaccines reach younger and younger adults. Over the summer, the absolute number of cases may drop as mass vaccination dampens transmission while the relative share of cases among the unvaccinated rises, simply because they are the ones still susceptible. The unvaccinated group will, of course, be disproportionately children. By dint of our vaccine order, COVID-19 will start looking like a disease of the young. This means vaccines are working, but it also means many Americans are flipping how they think about COVID-19 risk. Adults who spent the past year worrying about their elderly parents are now worrying about their kids instead. The risks are not equivalent, of course: Kids are 8,700 times less likely to die of COVID-19 compared with those older than 85. But “even if the risk is not particularly high, you’re still going to be extra protective of your kids,” says Sandra Albrecht, an epidemiologist at Columbia. “It’s just human nature.”

In coming months, parents may find themselves going back to normal while their kids still have to wear masks indoors. “It’s a very strange relationship to feel protected when your kids are still not,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. But some 30 million households have children still too young to be vaccinated; in these families, parents and caretakers, especially of the youngest children, will have to keep navigating this incongruous world. The biggest risk factor to consider for unvaccinated kids, experts told me, is simply how much COVID-19 is spreading in the community. The U.S. is currently vaccinating at a good clip, and even partial herd immunity will slow transmission of the coronavirus. Seasonal effects may drive case numbers even lower in the summer. “If there’s very little virus circulating, that’s a pretty low-risk situation,” says Sean O’Leary, a paediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Experts have pegged the threshold where general restrictions can relax at 5,000 to 10,000 cases per day—the point at which risk of COVID-19 is roughly comparable to risk of the flu. (For context, the seven-day average of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. reached a low point of 20,000 last summer and peaked at 250,000 during the winter surge; that number has since plateaued at 70,000.)

Not everyone will feel comfortable with the same level of risk though. Even before the pandemic, O’Leary points out, parents with children who have high-risk medical conditions were very careful about, say, traveling during flu season. COVID-19 might be another reason for these families to be vigilant. But already, momentum in the country is shifting toward reopening. States are ending their mask mandates and COVID-19 restrictions. How low cases go in the U.S. later this year will depend on the speed at which we inoculate harder-to-reach populations, as well as continued vigilance among the still-unvaccinated. Letting up after a year of social distancing is tempting, but as my colleague Katherine Wu writes, our vaccine cheat days add up. Variants may also influence case levels, but it’s not entirely clear how much. Early on, scientists in the U.K. thought the B.1.1.7 strain might be disproportionately more contagious among children than among adults, but the pattern has not held up. That may be because the variant was first detected after schools in the U.K. opened in the fall, explains Oliver Ratmann, a statistician at Imperial College London who has modelled the implications of the variant for kids. Then schools closed and mobility patterns changed over the holidays, which complicated the preliminary trends. The earlier pattern of B.1.1.7 in kids might just have reflected who had a chance to spread the virus at the time, especially because U.K. schools took fewer precautions, such as mask wearing, compared with many in the U.S. The evidence on whether this variant causes more severe illness is also mixed.

snip

[OhioChick]

1. This is important.....

I have teachers call me several times a week in a panic because so many kids are testing positive, the districts are hiding it here. They're likely doing this elsewhere.

Why are our schools even open during a pandemic?

Kids get infected then take it home to their parents, families and quite often grandparents who watch them after school. (Not everyone has been able to get vaccinated in some States, yet)

Keep in mind that we have variants arriving soon that are more deadly and contagious to mostly children....who have not been vaccinated.

People have numbed themselves to the refrigerated trucks outside hospitals and daily deaths.

Just wait until they're putting a plethora of children into refrigerated trucks.

[LittleGirl]

2. Good points

My friend here in Switzerland is about 58 years old with two teens still at home, going to school.
They started mass testing in the schools about a month ago. They found that one of her teen sons tested positive. So she and her hubby and other son got tested that day. She was positive but hubby and other son negative.
Within 6 days, she was in the hospital and spent 8 days there. It was the UK variant B117.
Before she headed to the hospital via ambulance, her husband and other son got tested again 3 days after the first test and both were positive by then. They had all quarantined in their own rooms, but it didn’t help. Their virus symptoms were not as hard as hers.
Her son was the only one at the school to test positive so the authorities believe he may have been infected on public transport.
Now that she has recovered, she is still wearing masks at home because her rate of catching another infection of some sort is high. She was a very healthy 58 year old before covid.

Her hubby and sons lost their sense of smell, but she did not.