The schoolchild to parent/teacher transmission story

[rogermellie]

Firstly - thanks for the sceptical safe space.

A statement that often comes up (on here and elsewhere), is that there are no documented cases of child to parent/teacher transmission worldwide. Something I've taken at face value, but perhaps wondered a little if that's because many schools were locked down prior to the big spikes of the beginning of the year.

I repeated this quote to someone recently who is a good deal less sceptical than myself, who said:

what about that summer camp in Georgia, USA. several hundred kids all got it there. That's what schools would be like if they were open now!

.
I hadn't heard of the story, and went away to read a few articles on it. Sure enough, 200+ cases, lots of stores about no masks, a few smuggled away facts about a people without symptoms, less information about how many (if any) were hospitalised, and very little facts about their transmission rates back to parents, carers, camp organisers etc etc.

So ... does this debunk the popular sceptic line about 'zero cases worldwide of child to parent/teacher transmissions'. Or is there some good sceptical comebacks behind this particular story.

ps, if you just google 'georgia covid camp' you'll get a good bunch of mainstream media articles on the topic.

Thanks in advance!

[guy153]

Interesting story! There's no evidence that the children transmitted the virus to the adults, it was just as likely to have been the other way round.

They defined a "case" as a positive test. Children do test positive for SARS2 they just very rarely get COVID-19 or severe COVID-19. That this is true is undeniable just by looking at the actual numbers of deaths and severe cases worldwide among children.

There is little doubt that children are at negligible risk from COVID-19 themselves. Lots of other viruses, that they get all the time, like RSV for example, are much more harmful to them, and we never closed schools for that. So why now?

But the other question is is there a risk to the teachers? This rests on how easy it is to catch SARS2 from an asymptomatically infected child who is hardly shedding any virus. It's likely to be extremely hard, and, in any case, since the teachers are under the age of 65, the risk to them is very low.

It's also interesting to look at why children hardly ever get COVID-19. The best evidence comes from this paper:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 4.095414v2

Which detected cross-immunity from other coronaviruses, especially in children. Note this from their conclusion:

Public health measures intended to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 will also prevent the spread of
and, consequently, maintenance of herd immunity to HCoVs, particularly in children. It is, therefore,
imperative that any effect, positive or negative, of pre-existing HCoV-elicited immunity on the
natural course of SARS-CoV-2 infection is fully delineated.

In other words if you don't get children back in school spreading the usual endemic coronaviruses among each other, as kids do, they may not stay so immune to COVID-19. The actions taken to minimise risk to teachers to unfeasibly low levels may be making matters worse for both children and teachers (without even considering the elephant in the room: the fact that tus children are missing their education and their friends)

[NeilW]

Ask them why they are so obsessed with the 90 or so deaths from Covid amongst children, but never said a peep about the 180-odd child deaths from Flu last winter.

Didn't they give enough value signalling points on Twitter?

[Kevin_Sceptic]

How this whole affair became so out of proportion to its severity is a fascinating topic, and a complete mystery to me.

I suspect that it has been building up for some years, in the nanny state, where the general public have become so used to "being looked after", and litigating at the first opportunity, that they now just take what they are told as gospel without a second thought.

People die every day. Of "natural causes", diseases, dementia, car accidents, accidents at home and work, etc. etc. Somehow that is "acceptable", but a death from this "deadly virus" is not?

"If it saves just one life" is only one part of the equation, as I believe the UK is now discovering.