
New evidence suggests children spread Covid-19 more efficiently than adults - ValentineC
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/07/31/new-evidence-suggests-young-children-spread-covid-19-more-efficiently-than-adults/
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nkurz
While the title might be correct, I feel this is a misleading article.

First, about the conclusions of the JAMA paper, the Forbes article says: _The
authors conclude it is likely that young children, while not as prone to
suffering from Covid-19 infection, still drive its spread—just as they do with
several other respiratory diseases._

Note the use of "likely".

But the JAMA article itself actually says: _Thus, young children can
potentially be important drivers of SARS-CoV-2 spread in the general
population, as has been demonstrated with respiratory syncytial virus, where
children with high viral loads are more likely to transmit._

Unless the JAMA authors say elsewhere that young children are "likely" to be
driving the spread of Covid-19, the switch from "potentially" to "likely" is
misleading.

Next, regarding the Trento preprint, the Forbes article says: _The researchers
found that although young children had a somewhat lower risk of infection than
adults and were less likely to become ill, children age 14 and younger
transmit the virus more efficiently to other children and adults than adults
themselves._

The implication of "somewhat lower risk" implies that the likelihood of
transmission is sufficiently greater to offset the lower risk that young
children are to become symptomatically infected. But Table 2 of the preprint
shows that while the transmission risk of children less than 14 was indeed
double that of other groups, only 1% of the tracked subjects were children
less than 14. While it's not clear that the sampling is entirely random,
unless children are extremely systematically underrepresented, it seems likely
that percentage of contagious young children (no breakdown was given for
"young children") must be very small, and that "somewhat less likely" is an
egregious understatement.

I applaud the Forbes article for including clear links to the underlying
papers, though! And I'd hope that these are honest errors that the author
might try to address, rather than any intentional attempts to mislead.

