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A new study from SK is being interpreted as being high quality evidence that after they pass 9 years of age, children are at least as infectious as adults with COVID.



I just want to highlight a few threads outlining the problems with this study. 1/5
@j_g_allen has a thread on the contradictions between different types of attack rates in their dataset.



2/5
@apsmunro has a thread pointing discussing the extremely small number of index cases in the 10-19 year age bracket (which seems weird, if it is supposedly the most infectious group)!.



3/5
Finally I have a reply thread here where I discuss the general tendency for extremely messy contradictory data to be used to simply reinforce our priors.



4/5
Taking a step back...
Let's also realize that it makes complete sense that 19-year olds exhibit infectiousness more like that of adults than young children. The question is when that really starts.

This study, which put 10-year olds and 19-year olds in a single age bracket, can't answer it. 5/5
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Wes Pegden
@WesPegden
A short thread on why I think it is important to engage seriously with analysis of herd immunity strategies regardless of whether you think we should be pursuing them right now. (Short version: understanding them may help prevent the most COVID deaths in the long term). 1/7
The first thing to emphasize is that not all herd immunity is the same. The pandemic flu of 1918—where death rates varied among U.S. cities by a factor of 3 depending on how they implemented mitigations, even though all reached herd immunity—is a historical demonstration. 2/7
For COVID in particular, the orders-of-magnitude variation in the mortality rate by age (anti-correlated with transmission rates) makes it plausible that we can have an order-of-magnitude effect on mortality and morbidity even within the context of reaching herd immunity. 3/7
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Wes Pegden
@WesPegden
The recent antibody surveys in NY state show similar COVID prevalence among younger and older people. E.g., 13% in the age group 35-45 had antibodies, and also in the age group 75+. This raises a disturbing question: 1/7
Natural differences in transmission rates should lead to significant variation in infection rates with age, since younger people empirically have more possible transmission events per day, on average. Mitigations affect these contact patterns, however: 2/7
If mitigations more sharply curtail interactions among younger people than older people (by closing schools, bars, etc.) then the expected result is a shift in the distribution of infection to be more uniform among age groups, rather than shifted towards younger people... 3/7
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