Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
... but if the mutated virus is more able to take over a human cell than the original strain, then might it not hit the younger children?
My understanding is that anybody carrying the virus can infect anyone else until their immune system can clear the virus out. If the strain infects more easily, then everyone is at risk. Am I right?
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There are the unknowns...
It’s not clear at this point if the potency of the new strain is down to an increased effectiveness of the spike, better escape from the immune system, higher viral load when infected, higher susceptibility of children, or a combination of all of these factors.
It has always been the big question - do kids get infected and do kids spread it when infected? The study I posted answers the second part without answering the first, namely kids, if infected (and we don’t know this) don’t make parents and Carers sick. Of course, this might change with the new variant but either the study has not been done (or completed) or the data is not good enough yet.
Testing data is seemingly showing high levels of infection in kids. Of course, we don’t have much testing data for asymptomatic people including kids over the period that study covers.
If, and it is a very big if, the new variant is simply just more infectious,
i.e. the R0 value is higher then all the numbers will shift somewhat towards the right in the diagrams in that paper. If the infectivity is 70% higher and the additional risks of kids being in school are tiny, then the risks from the new variant are 1.7x a tiny number.
In short ‘I dunno’.