Drosten and the children - Numbers with a goal

For all the situation-related limitations of our knowledge about COVID-19, there were clear indications very early in the course of the pandemic that

• Children rarely contract COVID-19 at all
• Children generally show only mild courses of the disease, if at all
• Closure of kindergartens and schools has only minimal effects on the spread of the disease
• Children are obviously also less likely to be infected than adults (this is not the same as being less likely to fall ill)
• Children are rarely "index patients" (i.e.: the starting point) of chains of infection

Especially the most systematic population studies on COVID-19 to date - the swab tests in Iceland on at least one percent of the population - did not find any positive SARS-CoV-2 swabs at all in children up to the age of 10 years "in the population screening, no child under 10 years of age had a positive result" (Gudbjartsson 2020) and also in Chinese family studies children were infected much less often than adults living in the same household (Jing 2020, Zhang 2020).

Some of these facts clearly distinguish COVID-19 from influenza, in which children play a decisive role in the chain of infection, because younger children in particular excrete influenza viruses longer than older or adults and because - according to chief coronologist Christian Drosten in an interview with Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland - the virus concentration in children can be 10,000 times higher than in adults (RND 29.04.2020).

This last point - the virus concentration in the throat in COVID-19 infection - in comparison between children and adults was the subject of a study now being conducted at the Charité under Drostens leadership, which has since been published (without peer review) (Jones 2020). The result is highly encouraging in terms of the question formulated by Drosten himself - in fact: it shows that, unlike in influenza, the virus concentration in children infected with COVID-19 is not higher than in infected adults. So actually the all-clear?

No - because the researchers ignore the apparently lower risk of infection that children have with COVID-19 (see above), they ignore the studies that prove that the closure of day-care centres and schools is largely ineffective for COVID-19 (see above) and overinterpret their own, purely virological (not: epidemiological!) laboratory research results as a reason not to seriously consider relaxing the closure of day-care centres or schools.

A review by German pediatricians on the role of children in SARS-CoV-2, which is due for publication, also criticises the conclusions of Drosten et al: "... the conclusion - children and adults are thus comparably infectious - is not permissible. This study is significantly biased, since primarily symptomatic patients were tested" and that the number of 16 children included in the analysis out of a total of almost 60,000 subjects was "not very representative" (Schober 2020).

Honi soit, qui mal y pense - with this French proverb (A rogue who thinks badly of it) Wolfgang Kubicki had already sharply criticized the RKI's number games as probably politically motivated... Those who - like Drosten here - formulate clear questions in public beforehand and then express the results of scientific studies in this way, let's put it carefully: interpreted one-sidedly and, as a virologist, once again not even hiding political demands in scientific works ("Based on these results, we have to caution against an unlimited re-opening of schools and kindergartens in the present situation" - Jones 2020), disqualifies himself (once again) as an unbiased advisor to a democratic government.

Translated and reblogged Version - Original here