My apologies for those tweets from Chirr App. I'm trying it out for longer threads, as trying manually to correctly number tweets etc is such a pain...
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I was just told "my son went to the Latitude festival, and he and all the people he went with have Covid".
This begs so many questions!
Transmission is predominantly airborne, and mainly occurs when aerosolised respiratory droplets can accumulate, and you spend enough time in the space to breathe in an infectious dose.
That's what most of us believe.
An anecdote like this suggests so many hypotheses that could be tested by investigating transmission patterns at events like Latitude.
Who are the people the son went with? What did they do together? Can you identify clusters or chains of transmission?
They dismiss PIMS-TS/MIS-C as uncommon and not proven to be caused by Covid-19. (I am comfortable with this.) 7/
They then, similarly, dismiss "Long Covid" in children. Given (the clue's in the name) that it will take time for sequelae, and their duration, to become apparent; and the increasing evidence base on this, this seems an extremely brave decision (as Sir Humphrey would say). 8/
They then briefly mention "indirect health benefits" (not infecting your parents and becoming an orphan etc) and dismiss them as not significant.
Another very brave decision. Where is the modelling? 9/
It's clear that their top priority was "reductions in hospitalisations and deaths in the population". 1/
They move on to considering vaccine safety - but say, in effect, there's not enough data.
But many other countries have been vaccinated children without significant safety signals.
They explain why they recommend vaccination of 12-17yos with certain conditions increasing their risk (and suggest there will be more detail to follow).
And recommend vaccinating those who are household contacts of immunosuppressed. 3/
It has been announced that JCVI has recommended, or likely to recommend, that only at-risk adolescents be offered the vaccine. I suspect that they considered in their modelling only the direct costs to the health service of acute disease.
1/3
I would be particularly interested to see their workings on:
* The benefits to children of ending the pandemic and inevitable restrictions sooner;
* The harms from the secondary cases from the children, especially if teachers, parents or carers are infected;
2/3
* The effect of Covid-19 (directly or through self-isolation etc) on loss of school;
* And , crucially, given the growing evidence, the long term consequences on the children and adolescents of “Long Covid”.
3/3
Doing trace and isolate properly is hugely resource intensive. Ideally you work out where they caught it and identify others potentially infected by the same source, and identify all the contacts that could become secondary cases and try to persuade them to isolate…
1/6
It took all of our resources in Surrey and Sussex for over a week to cope with one case in Feb 2020 There are few shortcuts, despite all we've learned (although there are a few more people to do the work).
2/6
It might be manageable if the number of new cases per day (in England) were in the very low hundreds - ideally less than 100.
3/6