Manchester33
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 12 Sep 2012
- Messages
- 6,857
This is a very serious issue and shows that without school children being vaccinated, the pandemic is going to rumble on in the UK for some time.The infection rates seen in children are not due to surge testing concentrated on schools. It's real.
How do we know? From samples where the same distribution that we see on the age heat maps is seen again.
From the React Study that came out this morning...
"We observed that growth was being driven by younger age groups, with five-fold higher rates of swab-positivity among younger children (ages 5 to 12 years) and young adults (18 to 24 years) compared with those aged 65 years and older, and 2.5-fold higher rates among those below 50 years compared with those 50 years and above. These age patterns suggest that recent expansion of the vaccine programme to those aged 18 years and above [14] should help substantially to reduce the overall growth of the epidemic. The observed patterns may reflect increased social interactions among children and young adults as schools remain open and lockdown eases, as well as high vaccine uptake among older people"
Oh and the R rate is at 1.44.
But signs its slowing. For a really excellent synopsis see the main article on BBC News...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57504172
I feel this may be the endgame of this epidemic. Its last throw of the dice which takes into the wonderful world of herd immunity or is that just Alice through the looking glass?
I heard someone on the news saying a reasonable estimate was that 1 in 1m children would die as a direct result of taking the vaccine and that the number of children who have severe reactions to the vaccine would be higher still.
I'm lucky that I don't have a child, but I'm not sure I'd be happy letting them take that risk. If we think the anti-vax crew are bad now, it's going to blow up when they go down that route!