
Medical research director sees light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/88/love--sex/we-dont-have-to-despair
======
progers7
"Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States
have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital."

Is this a typo? Possibly he meant 0.2%?

The data from my county (Alameda) has 1,450 cases <18 and 0 deaths:
[https://covid-19.acgov.org/data.page](https://covid-19.acgov.org/data.page)

Similarly, data from South Korea, Spain, and Italy, and China is <= 0.2%:
[https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-
fatalit...](https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatality-
rate-of-covid-19-by-age)

~~~
cbsks
Here's the full quote: "We now see this multi-system, inflammatory condition
can be fatal for kids, who average 8 years old. Almost 2 percent of the kids
diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States have died from it, and the
majority of them wind up in an ICU in a hospital. We see it in some adults.
It’s debilitating, not requiring hospitalization, but they have difficulty
breathing and joint aches—which are really telling—chest pain, and other
symptoms that affect brain function."

It looks like a typo. It should say "Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed
with MIS-C in the United States have died from it"

Edit: I just realized the first comment in the article has exactly the same
suggestion

~~~
mdorazio
Good catch. The next question is what percentage of kids contract MIS-C as a
result of COVID? Based on the <18 death toll reported so far, it seems like it
must be a small percentage.

Edit: Answering my own question with a quick reading of [1]. 186 patients
identified total, if I'm reading correctly. This is a tiny number. 2% of that
would be 4 kids.

[1]
[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021680](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021680)

~~~
cbsks
"As of 8/6/2020, CDC has received reports of 570 confirmed cases of MIS-C and
10 deaths in 40 states and Washington, DC."

"99% of cases (565) tested positive for SARS CoV-2, the virus that causes
COVID-19. The remaining 1% were around someone with COVID-19."

[https://www.cdc.gov/mis-c/cases/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/mis-c/cases/index.html)

~~~
s1artibartfast
Thanks, so the chance is roughly 500/5,000,000 among individuals with a
positive covid test.

~~~
cbsks
MIS-C only affects children so the denominator is less than 5,000,000. But
your point still stands, it seems to be relatively rare.

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mrfusion
Pandemics end when people end them, not when the disease ends.

~~~
bumby
Do you mean that pandemics don’t really end, but only get reclassified?

Or do you mean they end when we cure ourselves through vaccines, herd immunity
etc.?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
These kind of highly communicable respiratory pandemics only get reclassified.
What we call "flu season", for example, is just the continuing spread of past
flu pandemics. Most health officials expect that this will be the long term
trajectory for the coronavirus, even with vaccines and herd immunity.

~~~
Retric
Some years we still have flu pandemics.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957–1958_influenza_pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957–1958_influenza_pandemic)

That’s 1+ million deaths when world population was less than 1/2 what it is
today.

~~~
mikem170
And the 1968 Hong Kong flu, which killed 1-4 million people, world population
half of what it is today.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_flu_pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_flu_pandemic)

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underdeserver
Why the hell does the URL have "love--sex" in it?

~~~
astrocat
"Love & Sex" is the title of issue 88, the current issue of the print/online
magazine in which this article appears.

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maxekman
I was surprised to notice that Nautilus does not use HTTPS. I wonder what the
thinking (or lack of) behind that is?

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nico_h
The other thing that stood out to me is this "The incidence of it is anywhere
from 10 to 80 percent, even in young people who recover from a mild attack of
COVID-19" about "Long COVID".

That seems very high.

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gns24
In the medium-term the most promising thing out there is better, faster,
easier testing. There are a number of organisations developing saliva-based
tests that can return results in around an hour for a few dollars a test.
Being able to test everyone on a regular basis may well be enough to keep the
disease under control without major impact on our lives.

There are significant resources going into scaling up new testing
technologies, but it's definitely not getting the support that vaccine
development is, and maybe it should.

------
slg
>We now see this multi-system, inflammatory condition can be fatal for kids,
who average 8 years old. Almost 2 percent of the kids diagnosed with COVID-19
in the United States have died from it, and the majority of them wind up in an
ICU in a hospital.

Schools are open in much of this country.

~~~
whiddershins
I would question this statistic, could even be a typo?

