Thread by @globalhlthtwit

I agree with you Rob about the severe social + educational impacts of lockdowns which children in countries that suppressed the virus with strong local public health measures to suppress infection have avoided. (1)

https://twitter.com/r_hughes1/status/1410200485487906816

But look at the figures from your own pre-print study. 5.1% of 12-17yo positivecases had symptoms lasting over a month, with at least 4 out of five having neurological symptoms (2)

A recent study of 394 + and 388 Covid - adult controls who had brain scans before the pandemic and after showed loss of brain cortex tissue in taste and smell areas of the brain in + cases. (3) medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

The authors from Imperial and Oxford end the paper saying "whether these changes prefigure a future vulnerability of the limbic system, including memory, for these patients remains to be investigated" (4)

If we assume half of the 4.1 million children aged 12-17 become infected, we could see 85000 children with these neurological symptoms, based on yr figurex, with unknown future effects on the developing brain. This is not 'minor' (5)

These figures suggest an urgent need to vaccinate children aged 12 and over. The problem of school absences is entirely due to government policy neglect of suppression policies and we are now in an impossible position where community transmission is way too high. (6)

In India, the paediatric recommendations are to reopen schools only when case positivity rate is <5% + falling for 2wks, and when cases are <20 per 100,000 for 2 weeks. (7)

Our UK policy is now to let schoolchildren "take it on the chin" and expose tens of thousands of kids to unacceptable symptoms and future risk. (8)

If govt had properly financed local public health teams, recruited an army of contact tracers on the ground, and paid cases and contacts to isolate, as they cd have done in Mar 2020, July 2020 and May 2021, we would not be in this awful choice between sch closure + brain harm (9)

Given the govts position, urgent rollout of vaccines to the 12-17 age group, and I would argue down to aged 5, is the minimum we can do to protect kids. (10)

So i dont think our positions are that polarised. But i will disagree if you think risks to children from Covid are trivial, or you oppose their vaxx. And im not going to let the govt off the hook from their reckless public health neglect. (12)