Before I get to the main topic for this post, I just want to note that here is a perfect example of panic porn using misleading information. (WHO Piece) WHO, which has amply disgraced itself, claims that there have been more CV-19 cases in the last two weeks than in the first six months of the epidemic. Among other things, even if true, which is dubious, it ignores the great disparity in testing rates in the two time periods. But what it really ignores, again, is the importance of looking at these statistics on a per capita basis, country by country. India is a huge country and has a lot of cases. It is not having nearly as bad a wave as the US had in late fall/early winter.
As readers know, the effect of the terror campaign and school closings on children is the one thing that fires me up the most about the epidemic response. Here are three studies again showing that children were both less likely to be infected and have serious disease and were less likely to transmit CV-19. I don’t care what excuses are used, teachers should have been doing full, in-person education and children should have been allowed to live as close to a normal life as possible. What we have done has scarred a whole generation for life. The first study dealt with household transmission and found that child index cases had far lower rates of secondary transmission than did adult ones and that adults were far more likely to transmit to children than vice versa. Another interesting finding was that in over half of households there was no secondary transmission. You just wonder what could account for that other than some immune response. (JID Article)
Next up, a study among children in Hong Kong. (JAMA Article) The researchers found that CV-19 was very unlikely to spread among children in schools, and that households were by far the main source of transmission to children, almost always from adults in the household. About 40% of all cases were asymptomatic and 99% of illnesses were mild.
Finally, this study from Israel has similar findings. (PLOS Study) 637 households were included in the study and all members of the household were tested by PCR and some for antibodies. Children were about 40% less likely than adults to be infected and were 60% less likely to infect someone else.
And here is a quick letter finding more evidence that people who have been infected are extremely unlikely to become reinfected. This study was done among health care workers and in comprehensive testing of an asymptomatic group found no reinfections. (JID Letter)
The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at 
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These studies exactly reflect what we have been seeing in our pediatric clinic in the last 15 months. Mild or nonexistent illness in children under the age of 12, slightly sicker teenagers and parents who may or may not have been very ill. Kids are supposed to be back in class, but due to the moronic policy of the public schools, if a kid has a sniffle, they MUSTBE TESTED FOR COVID OR THEY CANNOT COME BACK TO SCHOOL!!! QUARANTINE THE ENTIRE CLASS FOR TEN DAYS!!! The frustration level of parents with their little ones being jerked in and out of class when they ARE NOT SICK is explosive. I cannot tell you the level of anger that I have felt over the destruction of children’s mental health, not to mention their lost learning, because of adult fear mongering. The complete irresponsibility of some teachers, not all, has been abhorrent. I have many teachers who are parents of children in my clinic and the vast majority of them have been disgusted by what their school district administrators have done as well as what their unions are foisting on them. As a daughter and granddaughter of teachers I do not in anyway I want to disparage teachers as if all of them were compliant in this fiasco, because they are not. They are victims both of the unions and of the feeble sheep who lead school districts. This includes both superintendents and school boards across the nation but particularly in Minnesota, California, New York, Massachusetts and Illinois. There is never ending shame to be piled upon their heads.
Prior to Covid, Eric Hanushek at Stanford did work on what happens to kids who had 2 years in a row with a poor-quality teacher. His findings were that students lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings. Well, we just did far worse than two bad teachers in a row: we gave a generation a year and a half of no teacher at all. We have permanently kneecapped an entire generation, and the most socio-economically disadvantaged with feel the worst of it.