Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Dumb and way dumber.

Woman claiming to be from 'Freedom To Breathe Agency' is filmed threatening grocery store worker | Daily Mail Online

 

Hopefully she also belongs to “Freedom not to procreate”.

 

Paulding is the county just west of me. Bless their hearts, there are a lot of confederate flags and trump stickers in that part of the state.

 

Curious to what data you have that kids under 15 have a viral loan big enough to spread. That just doesn’t support national or international data. High schoolers definitely have a chance to spread though and should be carefully monitored.

 

Children Often Carry More Coronavirus than Adults Do: Study

Young kids could spread COVID-19 as much as older children and adults, study suggests: Findings important to nationwide conversations on reopening schools and daycare

Study finds higher viral load in young children, raising questions about how likely they are to transmit the coronavirus - CNN

 

Here are some facts for you
Children Often Carry More Coronavirus than Adults Do: Study

Young kids could spread COVID-19 as much as older children and adults, study suggests: Findings important to nationwide conversations on reopening schools and daycare

 

Viral load all the sudden is the bar for spread?

Children rarely transmit COVID-19, doctors write in new commentary: Schools can reopen in fall, they say, if safety guidelines are observed and community transmission is low
Part of the study from the link
In the new Pediatrics study, Klara M. Posfay-Barbe, M.D., a faculty member at University of Geneva's medical school, and her colleagues studied the households of 39 Swiss children infected with Covid-19. Contact tracing revealed that in only three (8%) was a child the suspected index case, with symptom onset preceding illness in adult household contacts.

Why It’s (Mostly) Safe to Reopen the Schools

Lots here from many different countries but a small highlight:
France announced its reopening plans on April 21, three weeks after its new cases peaked, and opened schools gradually over the course of May and June, with mask requirements for high-school students but not younger children. Attendance was voluntary. A study by researchers at Institut Pasteur of students ages 6–11 found that “there was no evidence of onwards transmission from children in the school setting.” Notably, the study was conducted in Crépy-en-Valois, a town north of Paris that had seen an outbreak originating with two high-school teachers that spread to adolescent students. France’s success with reopening led the government to reduce its distancing mandate from four square meters between students to one linear meter and to make attendance mandatory for primary and middle schools.

Again high school needs the attention not middle or grade school.

 

Nine people tested positive for COVID-19 at the Georgia high school where the hallway photos were taken. The school will close for a deep clean the next two days while the kids distance learn.

So how often will this happen? And what kind of educational experience is this for the kids? And how many people will get the disease from people infected in the school when they take the virus home with them?

 

The viral load is a primary indicator of when a person is shedding enough to be infectious

The French study was in February and had 510 students with only 3 suspected (not confirmed) infections in children with no data with respect to what their viral load was or if they were even infected. When France reopened schools the per capita infection rate was much lower than in the US. We have no information on density of schools (students per SF of school) or whether their schools are a/c with air being recirculated.

Much closer to home, we have the YMCA camp in Georgia where 75% of those tested were infected, most likely by other kids

 

cleaning might help but the infection seems to be spread primarily through airborne droplets. spacing and masking is only way they will make a difference

 

Some interesting thoughts here (and before the usual suspects paint him as an unhinged lib, he's a Republican):
A National Lockdown Could Be The Economy's Best Hope, Says Minneapolis Fed President
The economic argument is what we're doing right now isn't working. We did a modest lockdown and then we let up far too quickly according to the public health experts, and now our economy is only very slowly recovering. Many people feel scared to go back into restaurants, so restaurants can't return to normal.

We're not really going to be able to return to a robust economy until we get control of the virus, and at 50,000 cases a day it's spreading like wildfire throughout the country. So unfortunately, yes, a lockdown for six weeks would impose short term pain, but I believe we as a country can afford to support Americans through that short term lockdown so then we can reopen and have a vigorous economy, have kids returning to school. I want us to get back to a robust economy as quickly as possible. This is much faster than allowing the virus to spread uncontrolled.
. . .
Well one of the things that has happened in this recession that is unlike any recession in modern times, our savings rate has taken off. It's really curious. Those of us, like me, who have been able to keep our jobs, we're actually saving more money because we're not going out to restaurants or movies or on vacations. So the personal savings rates soared from about 8% to 20%.

The way it works is that money then gets put in the bank, or put into a money market fund, and those resources are available so that when the government runs deficits, it doesn't have to borrow as much from abroad because we're generating savings domestically. It is much safer for a country to fund its own government deficits from its own people than it is to borrow from abroad. . . . I know it's complicated, but this is a unique moment when the traditional concerns about government deficits, debt to GDP, do not apply.

 

Maybe one of the reasons we have struggled so desperately against this virus is because we started off so far behind. One of the reasons we were behind were the professional liars who were paid to ensure we were in order to maximize shareholder value.

I sold Americans a lie about Canadian medicine. Now we’re paying the price.

Nevertheless, I spent much of that year as an industry spokesman, my last after 20 years in the business, spreading AHIP’s “information” to journalists and lawmakers to create the impression that our health-care system was far superior to Canada’s, which we wanted people to believe was on the verge of collapse. The campaign worked. Stories began to appear in the press that cast the Canadian system in a negative light. And when Democrats began writing what would become the Affordable Care Act in early 2009, they gave no serious consideration to a publicly financed system like Canada’s. We succeeded so wildly at defining that idea as radical that Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), then chair of the Senate Finance Committee, had single-payer supporters ejected from a hearing.

Today, the respective responses of Canada and the United States to the coronavirus pandemic prove just how false the ideas I helped spread were. There are more than three times as many coronavirus infections per capita in the United States, and the mortality rate is twice the rate in Canada. And although we now test more people per capita, our northern neighbor had much earlier successes with testing, which helped make a difference throughout the pandemic.

The most effective myth we perpetuated — the industry trots it out whenever major reform is proposed — is that Canadians and people in other single-payer countries have to endure long waits for needed care. Just last year, in a statement submitted to a congressional committee for a hearing on the Medicare for All Act of 2019, AHIP maintained that “patients would pay more to wait longer for worse care” under a single-payer system.

While it’s true that Canadians sometimes have to wait weeks or months for elective procedures (knee replacements are often cited), the truth is that they do not have to wait at all for the vast majority of medical services. And, contrary to another myth I used to peddle — that Canadian doctors are flocking to the United States — there are more doctors per 1,000 people in Canada than here. Canadians see their doctors an average of 6.8 times a year, compared with just four times a year in this country. Then there’s quality of care. By numerous measures, it is better in Canada. Some examples: Canada has far lower rates than the United States of hospitalizations from preventable causes like diabetes (almost twice as common here) and hypertension (more than eight times as common). And even though Canada spends less than half what we do per capita on health care, life expectancy there is 82 years, compared with 78.6 years in the United States.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/06/health-insurance-canada-lie/?arc404=true

 

Happy 5 millionth infection!!! We are going the wrong way. sigh

 

The French study is with schools opening with in 3 weeks of their peak. Guess when Florida peeked and when our schools open??
Also what does current spread have to do with the fact kids under 15 just do no spread it. Even amongst active cases, there is far more evidence that age group doesn’t spread it.

By the way, all the study’s you link all acknowledge that they did not study for spread and that they think it could mean they can.

If their higher viral loads are indicators, than why are there not reports all over the world of grade school kids spreading??

Seems like just even 1 one infected kid would be a super spreader based on your assumption. Any community would be ravaged.

Hell Sweden never locked down or closed school and though no one did an official study (Wish they would have) they are claiming that their schools did not cause further spread.

Is it safe to send kids back to school?

A nine-year-old boy with coronavirus in the French Alps in February did not transmit the virus to anyone elsedespite exposure to more than 170 people, including close contact within schools.

It is possible for children to introduce covid-19 into their household—a study from China identified three occasions when a child under 10 was the “index case” in a home. But it seems to be rare

the table I attached shows that young children have very rare spread to their households.

Some more good reading on the matter.
Really looking forward to this study
Study to determine incidence of novel coronavirus infection in U.S. children begins

 

The Georgia YMCA camp documents spread between kids and young adults. If you have high viral loads how could you not be infectious? Is the virus in kids somehow not shedding? That doesn't make any sense

 

Unfortunately mask wearing has become a shibboleth and those who don't won't believe this study and those who do already do.

Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech

 

Facts are 45 kids under 15 from February until now have died with Covid. 13,088 died from everything else. If you are good at math then you know that is a very small number. All the European countries have opened their schools and didn't see outbreaks stem from schools opening. Those are facts. The rest of what you are saying is BS. Show me a European country that opened schools and had an outbreak. Go ahead, I'll wait.

 

Arent daycares open in Florida?