sTeamTraen wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 12:39 pm
bob sterman wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 8:59 am
shpalman wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 8:17 am
Why would you expect the prevalence to be higher among teenagers and young adults in the second wave as compared to the first one?
In the UK schools were closed and all face-to-face teaching at universities was stopped during first wave. Organised youth sport was also stopped.
Yes, plus the pubs were open for much of the autumn. But it's also a relative thing: A person who is infected now is more likely to be a younger person because the older people are keeping out of the way as much as possible.
I can't really follow your reasoning.
So
the hospitals are now full of children in a way they weren't during the first wave because
(a)
actually they aren't;
(i) someone who works in a children's ward notices more children than usual are in it but doesn't have an overview of the rest of the hospital i.e. hasn't noticed that there are actually
way more adults in there than usual, and way more adults than children, in the hospital as a whole;
(b) they were full of children during the first wave too but we didn't notice because
(i) we didn't test them for covid ("
out of every 100 people who got a positive there were probably only 1 or 2 children")
(ii) we were distracted by all the older people who were also in hospital (the first wave seemed to skew towards older people because they all caught it in nursing homes or hospitals and/or tests were only carried out on patients severe enough to end up in hospital, who would have been more likely to be older)
(c) they are catching covid more because it's a variant of the virus which children are more likely to be infected by
(d) they are catching covid more because schools have been open i.e. child-child transmission rather than parent-child (so shouldn't we see more child-parent transmission too i.e. more infections in parent-age adults too so the age profile wouldn't stay biased towards only children)
(e) they are catching covid at the same rate as before but it's a variant of the virus which is more severe in children
(f) because
the pubs were open, which children don't go to and parents probably haven't been going to, as compared to "
teenagers and young adults [who] take more risks generally" but this somehow translates towards there being more children in hospital
?
Point (a) renders the whole discussion moot.
Point (b) makes no sense because
like I said, we'd have noticed if lots of children had to go to hospital because of their symptoms, whether or not you'd manage to get covid tests for them. It has never been the policy to take someone to hospital just because they tested positive but were asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic. It was just that we generally didn't even pick up those cases the first time around.
Point (d) makes little sense to me because having schools open doesn't necessarily skew the age distribution that much towards children if parents and children can always catch it from each other. Having schools open just increases infection across the whole community (which is generally the result that we've seen) although maybe in the second wave people have learnt to keep the grandparents out of it
("
the older people are keeping out of the way as much as possible").
Regarding point (e) we don't have evidence that the new variant is more severe in adults.
Point (f) has got nothing in particular to do with children, it's just another driver of general community transmission. The heatmap of
cases in England clearly shows a high case rate in 15-19 year olds, and 20-24 year olds... at the beginning of October, before then spreading to everyone else. The late-December second half of the second wave seems distributed across all ages from 10 to 69 without one age group obviously leading.
So I'm only left with (c), if not (a).