Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Zanza]

UK covid death 7-day average is a bit above 100 a day, isn't this a bit high as compared to similar large European countries?

Germany has now officially entered its fourth wave with exponentialgrowth again, so while death figures right now are moderate, they are expected to climb a lot in the next weeks.

[alfred russel]

You don't have any unvaccinated children, do you?

It certainly wouldn't impact my decision making...look at the stats. 430 people 18 or under have died from covid per CDC statistics. There are much bigger risk factors their lives don't get turned upside down over.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv

[alfred russel]

In other - probably unrelated news - it looks like Georgia is on the cusp of running out of ICU beds.

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/with-georgias-icu-beds-full-rural-hospitals-say-they-have-nowhere-to-transfer-their-critical-patients

It is almost certainly unrelated, or at least tenuously related. Vaccination rates in rural areas of Georgia are abysmal. It has been running joke that when we go into a gas station in rural Georgia that they know we are from Atlanta if we wear a mask - that goes back long before vaccines. Gyms in Atlanta that have been open since May 2020 don't seem like a reason hospitals are getting crushed in August 2021 in other parts of the state. those communities only have themselves to blame for any death coming their way.

[Jacob]

It certainly wouldn't impact my decision making...look at the stats. 430 people 18 or under have died from covid per CDC statistics. There are much bigger risk factors their lives don't get turned upside down over.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv

How confident are you about the absence of longterm impact of non-asymptotic covid on non-vaccinated children?

[Sheilbh]

How confident are you about the absence of longterm impact of non-asymptotic covid on non-vaccinated children?

I think there's reasons to be fairly confident:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/long-covid-uncommon-in-children

Edit: In terms of children I think the bigger risk - which has been filling up paediatric wards in the UK and New Zealand - is severe standard childhood illnesses (like RSV) which is a consequence of lower levels of immunity across society.

[Jacob]

I think there's reasons to be fairly confident:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/long-covid-uncommon-in-children

Excellent.

Personally it's my strong preference that my child is not one of the people that form the dataset for those studies.

[Jacob]

It is almost certainly unrelated, or at least tenuously related. Vaccination rates in rural areas of Georgia are abysmal. It has been running joke that when we go into a gas station in rural Georgia that they know we are from Atlanta if we wear a mask - that goes back long before vaccines. Gyms in Atlanta that have been open since May 2020 don't seem like a reason hospitals are getting crushed in August 2021 in other parts of the state. those communities only have themselves to blame for any death coming their way.

I'm not talking about your gyms particularly - gyms are open in Vancouver also and have been for quite a while - but about your argument that we seem to live in completely different worlds. And I do think that there's a relationship between the differences in our worlds and the fact that ICU beds are close to maxed out in your world.

[Sheilbh]

Excellent.

Personally it's my strong preference that my child is not one of the people that form the dataset for those studies.

Absolutely - but this is why I think the regulators have a tougher balance for children and vaccinations.

The risks from covid are so low. There was a big data study across the NHS data and I think in the entire pandemic - and the UK has had a bad pandemic - only 250 kids have gone into ICU (about 5,000 have been hospitalised but that's against over 350,000 hospitalisation for other reasons, excluding accidents). With deaths and hospitalisations it seems far more likely here there are other health issues that make covid more dangerous: obesity and especially certain severe disabilities (over half of the deaths in children in the UK have been kids with "life-limiting" disabilities). So weighing up that against known side effects that happen on a sort of 1 in a 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 or even (like the AZ clotting issue), say, closer to 1 in a 100,000 is a far more difficult call than it is for adults.

Also I think the wider vaccinating everyone else is really important - so despite delta and case numbers in the UK being far higher this summer, prevalence in schools was actually lower during the delta wave than at the start of the school year when rates were far lower but there were no vaccines. I think that probably reflects school staff and parents getting vaccinated (I think about 95% of school staff have got vaccinated), as the new cases were primarily in unvaccinated age groups like young people in pubs it was still getting into schools but at a far lower rate because the adults in the school and the school gate were better protected. The other factor is probably that the UK does a lot of testing of schoolkids and I don't think that as fully in place in September but it allows people to get pinged and take measures.

[Sheilbh]

Bloody hell - in going too far from the UK's ongoing alpaca controversy to the other extreme of animal rights - councils in Australia have been shooting rescue dogs to stop volunteers from animal shelters picking them up (and breaching covid rules).

Australia's done incredibly well in isolating and stropping covid - but it has had a cost that I think is reaching the end of popular support. Melbourne has been in hard lock-down more than any other city in the world. Delta is proving really difficult to contain through non-pharmaceutical interventions. So far vaccine take up is low (and Australia seems to have really embraced some non-scientifically guided stuff like panicking about people queuing for a vaccine outside) and they've destroyed a large amount of AZ because trust in that vaccine is shot but Australia doesn't have nearly enough Pfizer/Moderna to replace it. The internal travel restrictions in Australia have also been incredibly stringent.

And there's a row between the Federal government which wants a broad end to lockdowns once the number of over-16s vaccinated hits 70% and almost entirely got rid of wants it hits 80%. But state leaders are pushing back and want to stick with Australia's "crush and kill" it zero covid approach - which might be possible, but it feels like only if Australia (and New Zealand) decide to remain either going into intermittent hard lock-downs or with their current very strict border controls.

[Legbiter]

Yeah, strict borders with the delta variety but no domestic curbs will result in leakage. We did that experiment. You'd have to do both. If they hadn't completely botched their vaccination rollout this wouldn't be much of an issue for Australia but since they did they're stuck with the worst of both worlds. Vaccination is not going to get them to herd immunity, the only way through is combinatory vaccination (to take the mortality/serious complications edge off) and naturally acquired immunity since the vaccines aren't effective enough to stop transmission. The other option is to permanently seal themselves off like some small Amazonian tribe but they'll still have constant leakage.

Here we'll begin vaccinating our 12 to 15 year olds tomorrow, everyone can be vaccinated within the week. Uptake will be solid around 80+% by the looks of it. After that it's boosters for oldies, etc and we'll still furiously test and trace along with the current restrictions on nightlife and gatherings. But otherwise the virus will do it's thing, the population will acquire full immunity and hopefully in a year or 2 covid will just fade into the common cold background like it's other cousins. Kids will encounter the virus early and repeatedly in their childhoods and build up lifelong immunity just like they do to myriads of other bugs.

[alfred russel]

It certainly wouldn't impact my decision making...look at the stats. 430 people 18 or under have died from covid per CDC statistics. There are much bigger risk factors their lives don't get turned upside down over.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv

How confident are you about the absence of longterm impact of non-asymptotic covid on non-vaccinated children?

I'm not confident at all. There very well could be. There are, for example, long term health consequences of other respiratory diseases such as pneumonia that can go into adulthood.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-09-tables-508.pdf

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b-4pzv

316 people died from influenza and pneumonia in 2019 in the 1-19 age group. That is roughly comparable to the 430 aged 18 and under that have died from covid (the age groups differ slightly, and the covid period is a bit more than 12 months). A few years ago if you wanted to avoid family gatherings because you don't want to expose your healthy children to the risks of pneumonia - it is your call - but that seems a bit risk averse.

Covid is new and it might have worse long term effects on kids or it might not. I don't see why we should approach uncertainty by assuming worse case outcomes, especially when we are talking about multi year periods.

[Legbiter]

316 people died from influenza and pneumonia in 2019 in the 1-19 age group. That is roughly comparable to the 430 aged 18 and under that have died from covid (the age groups differ slightly, and the covid period is a bit more than 12 months).

I wonder how many of those children had serious underlying conditions (say, leukemia). We've had a couple thousand kids below age 16 catch this, not one had serious symptoms or was hospitalized. The median age of the hospitalized here is around 62.

[alfred russel]

316 people died from influenza and pneumonia in 2019 in the 1-19 age group. That is roughly comparable to the 430 aged 18 and under that have died from covid (the age groups differ slightly, and the covid period is a bit more than 12 months).

I wonder how many of those children had serious underlying conditions (say, leukemia). We've had a couple thousand kids below age 16 catch this, not one had serious symptoms or was hospitalized. The median age of the hospitalized here is around 62.

That is out of a population of like 70 - 80 million in the age group. I guess the comparative population in Iceland is under 100k?

[Legbiter]

Yeah 0-19 age cohort here is around 90k.

[jimmy olsen]

Got my first shot this morning, Pfizer.