Thread by @TracyNovick

I want to push some of this from @derspiegel out in a thread, because it's based in part on the sort of universal testing (within the study referenced) that we don't have.

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1337533583754399747

"Since the end of September, the Austrian researchers have paid visits to more than 240 schools. There goal is to perform as many tests as they can at regular intervals throughout the entire schoolyear."

"They hope to test up to 15,000 children between the ages of six and 15 in addition to 1,200 teachers to establish a representative sample size."

So this isn't waiting for someone to have symptoms or known exposure; this is just show up, test everyone, where are we at.

"An analysis of the initial samples revealed a positive rate of 0.4 percent among those tested at random. The samples from November reveal a significant increase to that number."

And they didn't know because they didn't have symptoms.

And also: "The mass tests also show that younger children are by no means exempt from infection by SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, there was no significant difference to infection rates among adults."

And now here is the part, when I look at who in Massachusetts has chosen to start and stay remote, I am really feeling convicted (in a good ol' Baptist sort of way) on:

"...schools in poorer areas were found to have 3.5 times as many positive results as elsewhere"

"...which is consistent with generally higher infection rates in lower income neighborhoods."

As an utter side note, far from the sort of shaming we've seen from Other Leaders Whom I Will Not Name Here, the article observes why this makes sense:

"People in such neighborhoods frequently live closer together and have jobs that don't allow them to work from home."

(waves to Chelsea, Everett, Revere, swathes of Boston, my own city, etc)

Different study, this time in Bavaria:

"A study involving more than 11,000 children in the German state of Bavaria also found a significant number of unreported cases among children and teenagers."

"Infection numbers in this demographic could be up to six times higher than the official total listed by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany's leading public health establishment."
That one looked at antibodies.

And of course, there's the littlest ones, right?

"Very young children, meanwhile, have also long flown below the radar, even if Berlin virologist Christian Drosten discovered back in spring that they aren't immune to SARS-CoV-2 either.

"His tests found a viral load in the throats of young children that was similar to other age groups."

Paralleled by research here in the U.S.: "Health experts in Chicago compared three age groups with each other: children under five, five to 17-year-olds and 17 to 65-year-olds.

"Surprisingly, they found that the youngest test subjects carried 10 to 100-times the viral load in their throats than older subjects."

But if they're asymptomatic, and so aren't coughing and such, maybe they don't spread the virus as much?

Well, remember the special magic of little kids:
"According to a survey analysis performed by pediatrician Petra Zimmermann at the Fribourg Canton Hospital in Switzerland, fully eight of 10 children infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus also had other infections at the same time."

(if you have spent time with small children, please pause for a rueful laugh, because *of course* their getting a common cold and sneezing because of that is going to inadvertently spread COVID-19. Doesn't that just figure?)

The article then walks through several smaller studies, all which show that the kids then bring it home and...other people get COVID-19.

Just for one: "A so-called prospective study, which followed the spread of the virus in 101 households in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marshfield, Wisconsin, from April to September, likewise implicated the children.

"The survey found that they were quietly responsible for bringing the virus into their homes. Despite the fact that they had no symptoms, they infected just as many people as did adults in other households who were proven carriers of the virus."
And there's your household spread

The thing is, it has to *get* to the household somehow.

"And clusters also have an enormous impact in schools. When children in Montréal went back to school following a lockdown, case numbers spiked.

"Soon, there were more cases in schools than there were in companies or among caregivers. The president of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease in Québec said: 'Schools were the driver to start the second wave in Québec.'"

"In Germany, meanwhile, Hamburg experienced the largest school outbreak of the coronavirus the country has yet seen in November.

"Almost 100 of the 550 students and school employees tested in the neighborhood of Veddel were positive. Fully 32 of the 74 teachers had contracted SARS-CoV-2.

"'Of course, it’s the case that the virus is carried into schools,' says RKI head Lothar Wieler. 'And that it is then carried back out again.'"

"In England, the incidence rate fell after the fall break. And Scottish researchers analyzed all anti-corona measures in 131 countries in a large modelling study.

"The R number, one way to measure the spread of infections, began falling once large events were banned and contacts were limited.

But they only plunged significantly once schools were closed."

Effectively, then, this runs through a lot of what we've seen around schools and children and infection rates around the world.
spiegel.de/international/…

Absolutely, how schools have gone back (masks/distancing/ventilation/etc) has varied.
The main upshot, though, from my read, is that when we have any sort of comprehensive testing, there's just a whole lot more of this around in kids than we know otherwise.

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