Very interesting stuff on This Week In Virology (on YouTube) I saw today. One was from a doctor who leads a medical group in New York. He said pediatricians are reporting a lot of cases of asymptomatic or mild Covid-19 confirmed by antibody testing in which the young person reports they can no longer play a sport such as soccer or Lacrosse that requires sustained cardiac output. Other reports include kids who can't concentrate in class or suffer from a generalized "brain fog". These are Long Covid symptoms.
The other was from a researcher who said everything we "know" about kids and Covid is wrong: We mostly test people with symptoms, and kids usually have asymptomatic cases, so they are very badly under-tested. When they look at antibody surveys of all ages, they find kids actually do get it at about the same rate as adults! The other thing is kids usually shed virus for only about two days, so sub-sampling in schools can easily miss kid's infections. They said in Korea they discovered kids role in the spread by contact tracing: Kids would often be the missing link in a contact thread.
So the attempt to get all the schools reopened in person before everybody gets vaccinated makes it almost a sure thing the parents and siblings of those school kids will be infected. And any grandparents living in their home may die. Some significant percentages of those adults and kids will suffer long-term health problems from Long Covid.
