[M T]

There is no particular reason to think that babies will have any more long term effects from this Coronavirus than from the other common Coronaviruses.

The same thing could be said about adults, right?

The problem is that this Coronavirus IS causing different effects than the others.  (I don't know, do the other Coronaviruses attack the same protein? I would guess not.).    I don't want to draw too close a parallel to rheumatic fever -- different bugs, but the same immune system possibly causing damage.   It is more an example of a disease with delayed (10-20yr) consequences.   (I am very glad that in 1st world countries in the 21st century, good medicine and the use of antibiotics have reduced rheumatic fever to a medical rarity!)

The point is that we have only a few months of experience.  This disease is behaving quite differently, or rather, our bodies are reacting to it differently than we've seen.

I think it is a significant risk to force kids (or adults) into scenarios where many will get an infection of a disease we have no history with.


By the way, some months ago I mentioned a parallel to trying to understand yellow fever.  I just reread an 1852 account of an outbreak of yellow fever, where the author (a MD) was describing everything that was going on in the town (wind & weather, a big excavation, an old, rotten building torn down, the nature of the spreading, some localization of the spread but some exceptions, some days where a large number of people got sick, some differences in who was getting sick, etc.), trying to understand how it was spreading.  Of course, we know now that mosquitoes were the vector, but at the time they didn't.   It feels eerily similar with our continued struggles to control the spread.   Looking back 170 years, it feels sort like watching a blindfolded person trying to pin the tail on the donkey.  But today, we're the ones with the blindfold, but we're starting to peek a little now.

[M T]

There is no particular reason to think that babies will have any more long term effects from this Coronavirus than from the other common Coronaviruses.

The same thing could be said about adults, right?

The problem is that this Coronavirus IS causing different effects than the others.  (I don't know, do the other Coronaviruses attack the same protein? I would guess not.).    I don't want to draw too close a parallel to rheumatic fever -- different bugs, but the same immune system possibly causing damage.   It is more an example of a disease with delayed (10-20yr) consequences.   (I am very glad that in 1st world countries in the 21st century, good medicine and the use of antibiotics have reduced rheumatic fever to a medical rarity!)

The point is that we have only a few months of experience.  This disease is behaving quite differently, or rather, our bodies are reacting to it differently than we've seen.

I think it is a significant risk to force kids (or adults) into scenarios where many will get an infection of a disease we have no history with.


By the way, some months ago I mentioned a parallel to trying to understand yellow fever.  I just reread an 1852 account of an outbreak of yellow fever, where the author (a MD) was describing everything that was going on in the town (wind & weather, a big excavation, an old, rotten building torn down, the nature of the spreading, some localization of the spread but some exceptions, some days where a large number of people got sick, some differences in who was getting sick, etc.), trying to understand how it was spreading.  Of course, we know now that mosquitoes were the vector, but at the time they didn't.   It feels eerily similar with our continued struggles to control the spread.   Looking back 170 years, it feels sort like watching a blindfolded person trying to pin the tail on the donkey.  But today, we're the ones with the blindfold, but we're starting to peek a little now.