> Children are Infrequently Identified as the Index Case of Household SARS-CoV-2 Clusters
> In analysis of the cluster index cases ... only 3.8% were identified as having a pediatric index case.
> These pediatric cases only caused 4.0% of all secondary cases, compared with the 97.8% of secondary cases that occurred when an adult was identified as the index case in the cluster.
> Clusters where the asymptomatic/symptomatic status of the contact cases was not described were excluded from the analysis. Even with this broader definition, 18.5% children were identified as the index case in the household clusters.
The GP explicitly says he is concerned for his child, and that's the only thing under discussion in this thread. In that context, it's worth pointing out that RSV is more dangerous to help people think about how they process this current risk.
It has been frustrating to see how these two non-mutually exclusive points have been used to debate each other. We talk around each other and can't have a logical conversation.
Omicron is so contagious that its going to burn through regardless of moderate mitigation techniques. NYC went from 1 case to 40,000 in a month. Even if you lock down for 3 months to get back to 0. We'd be back to 40,000 the second we reopened.
Delay isn't worth anything unless hospitals are so bad people will die from preventable deaths.
Some people have adventures and others have “in-ventures”. You are ok with holing up in your abode for years of your life to avoid a mild risk (assuming you are under 70 years old and reasonably healthy). Others are not willing to live this way and would like the freedom to make that choice. Some people, by the way, have less choice, like the people that deliver your food and merchandise to the cave you call home or the people that treat your non-covid (of course) injuries and ailments.
Just because you didn't get it yet doesn't mean you can avoid it forever. Expecting permanent unceasing vigilance by everyone is absurd and unrealistic. The virus will never go away. Do you really think young people should cancel all parties forever?
I don't have numbers handy, but I would suspect that at least 10x more Americans caught Covid at work as out partying. If only because people spend more time at work.
>Work and school are those special places where "COVID doesn't spread", according to the powers that be.
Who are those "powers that be"? According to OSHA[0] and CMS[2], workplaces (general workplaces and healthcare settings that accept Medicare and Medicaid funding, respectively) have grave risks of COVID transmission.
In fact, they feel so strongly about it that they've taken it to the US Supreme Court[1].
The other members of the household are already vaccinated for COVID-19 if they want to be. The vaccines are still highly effective at preventing deaths.
RSV isn't really safe for adults either. But we accept the risk.
So effective, you go from 98.999% recoverable to 99.998% recoverable. Amazing. So glad we shut down everything and destroyed countless lives for less than 1% of gain.
And as TFA says, the rest of society is “vaxxed and done”. So why are we harming children by closing schools to “protect” people who are going out to bars and restaurants?
But what it got to do with vaccination? Children are going to still spread it whether they are vaccinated or not. There are some claims about vaccination reducing the load and therefore reducing infection of other people but I find it a very hard to control type of research and seeing so many vaccinated getting corona I don't think it is so significant in protecting other people and preventing spread. Maybe just a little bit, but how do you measure how much is the right amount in order to make kids getting the vaccination more beneficial overall than not?
And we aren’t shutting society down because of the risk of C19 to small children either. The risk to children is part of that, but the risk to the adults who care for them is another reason. Additionally, staffing levels are impacted because the adults who have it.
Also, generically, when we have a super spreadable disease, we want to minimize transmission. This is done as a precaution against mutation (the more infections mean more mutations!) and because we don’t have a good idea what the long term effects are.
If you only look at the daycare closures in isolation, you’re not doing the calculus for the system. If there is one thing we’re learning during Covid, it’s how interconnected we all are.
Finally, is the acceptance of RSV a result of a good public health decision? Or have we, as a society, just massively underindexed on ignoring public health?
"Also, generically, when we have a super spreadable disease, we want to minimize transmission."
There is a contradiction in there. Minimizing transmission of super spreadable disease is extremely hard, precisely because it is super spreadable; in this case, just by breathing in the same space. It could be done with very harsh measures - see the Zero Covid strategy in China - but after two years of pandemics, people are tired.
"as a precaution against mutation (the more infections mean more mutations!)"
True, but there are 8 billion people out there and a majority of them aren't living in countries that successfully minimized transmissions of covid. Further mutations will likely come anyway, as the global viral load is probably in trillions of viral particles daily. At that point, it is a question of tradeoff.
At this point, Omicron is looking like its going to vaccinate a large portion of the population, especially the more folks resistant to vaccination. My hope is that Omicron is the real first step to herd immunity.
No, it'll live and mutate in deer, rodents cats etc. Won't see herd immunity ever. Even this 'natural' vaccine won't distribute fast enough to outrun the pace of its mutations.
The more varieties of coronavirii that we encounter, the more our immune system will build a broad-spectrum response to that "class" of virus. To be clear, I am not saying that the coronavirus is going to disappear. I'm saying that it will become closer to a common cold over time.
> staffing levels are impacted because the adults who have it.
Specifically, staffing levels are impacted by the policy of people who have tested positive but are not sick.
>>> "The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations," Noble wrote in an email to SFGATE. "The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines.
If you wanted to effectively reduce spread and mutations you'd have to vaccinate every mouse, dog, and white-tailed deer - Omicron is so infectious that there is no mitigation only applied to humans that could be effective.
The point of the remaining ones is to not send people to hospital and spread it out some until we get antivirals.
RSV is the worst virus I've had in a decade, probably since I had shingles in my twenties. My daughter brought it home from daycare and both my partner and I had a low-grade fever for 2 weeks, and a bad dry cough for another 2 weeks after that that would wake us up multiple times a night. Daughter bounced back in about half the time. By contrast, Covid hit us all recently and we were all 100% within the week. Your mileage may vary.
My little girl was eligible for the RSV vaccine, as she was immunocompromised. It sucks watching/hearing our friend's kids being hospitalised by it, knowing there's a vaccine for it, but it's so expensive ($3000-$6000 /yr /child), unless covered by insurance (if eligible), that it's out of reach for most families.
Sorry, it was naive of me to call it a vaccine, it’s just what it was referred to, or RSV shot. There are vaccines for RSV in the works though, hopefully give people better access to preventive medicine
How is it so hard for you people to understand that we shut down society because the health system is stressed at unforeseen levels? I mean just ask your fellow emergency workers how their life is right now.
The major hospitals in my (Top 10 American) metro area are currently doing patient "diversion." In practice, this means that they are not accepting most trauma patients, elective surgeries like cancer removals are being delayed, and patient care for non-Covid conditions is being impacted. This is primarily due to the hospitals being at/over capacity. These hospitals are not admitting hypochondriacs, the folks taking up the beds are sick and need to be hospitalized.
Uh, it factually is a coronavirus, of which several are already endemic "colds," and within another year or two (or so) we are looking at this also becoming "just another cold." This is the meaning of currently talking about the virus becoming endemic. It's here to stay like our other colds that should be added, were also deadly when they first started.
Uhh it factually causes hospital and ICU intervention in 15% of the cases. Maybe with Omicron we get a bit luckier but that’s just chance and not predictable evolution.
It’s not just a cold. You’re quite obviously not a virologist or epidemiologist so stop acting smarter than you are about this topic and listen to experts who actually know their field.
For some reason anything about Covid attracts all the HN cranks. Or just reminds me that HN is full of cranks. The kind of crowd that would get upset at calling Jan 6 an insurrection.
The cranks are the people in this very thread who are saying they are okay with permanent masks and boosters. The fact is, the vaccines are here, and they work. People need to stop being antivax and asking everyone around them to lock down just because they can't understand that it's time to move on and stop doubting just how effective the vaccines really are because of a 0.0001% chance they might maybe not work for them very well.
What we are seeing right now is the same "pro vaxxers, pro science" types revealing their true face by not being willing to accept that the vaccine works and that the science is clear; omicron is mild, hospitalizations are fine, and that the virus is essentially harmless for kids. They are the equivalent of tinfoil wearers that "wear them just in case" aka cranks.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously with this post, and have been repeatedly posting other flamewar comments too. We've had to ask you many times not to do that. I had to ask you about this fairly recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29190706.
If you keep it up, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that so, regardless of how right you are or how strongly you feel, would you please stop?
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of how much smarter or better you consider yourself. It's an extremely low-quality kind of comment, and evokes worse from others.
Not only that, but such generalizations are inevitably bogus, because people make them based on the data points they remember, and remember the ones they hate the most.
Edit: please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments generally. You've been doing that repeatedly lately, and it's not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758975 was particularly egregious—you can't do that on this site, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Please don't cross into personal attack or break the site guidelines, no matter how bad another comment is or you feel it is. It only makes everything worse.
It's not "asymptomatic hypochondriacs". "Hospitalized with no symptoms" mean they're in the hospital for other reasons and just happened to test positive.
Although, even vaccinated people hospitalized "for covid" at the moment are mostly there for things like dehydration, similar to the flu.
Just ask my close emergency worker friends and family? They're mostly unwilling to get vaccinated, understand this more than yourself, and they think it's endemic and pointless to get the vaccine. They usually bring up the fact they all have MRSA in their noses and on all their surfaces all day long and they'll get over it. They've all had COVID. Immunocompromised people will continue to die from pnuemonia, flus, etc regardless of impositions from society.
> Just ask my close emergency worker friends and family? They're mostly unwilling to get vaccinated ...
What? My uncle (father's real brother) is a doctor and he is fully vaccinated and boosted. Two other cousins are doctors are vaccinated and boosted. My wife's side of family has several in nursing and administration staff at hospitals, all of them are boosted. Most of the hospitals these folks mentioned above are associated with have fully vaccinated staff.
There is a large variance in vaccination rates among different types of healthcare workers. Rates are high among physicians but lower among nurses and aides.
https://www.medscape.com/answers/971488-177692/what-is-the-p...