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Crowdsourcing Science Inconsistencies, Economic & Legal Issues

188 issues and counting!

Due to the irregular nature of the COVID-19 responses, this is a crowdsourcing tool for organizing the economic ramifications, scientific inconsistencies, and legal issues. Our desire is to see a rational and principled approach to COVID-19 where the rights of citizens and commerce are protected.

This is for aggregating publicly available items of evidence that would be admissible in courts, not general news stories.

Submitted items may be edited or deleted to ensure the quality of content. 188 issues and counting!

Why Were Flu Cases Down During The 2020-21 COVID-19 Pandemic?

Few Americans have confirmed few cases in 2020-21

CDC Pulls PCR Tests Because they Can’t Differentiate Between COVID and Flu

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urged labs this week to stock clinics with kits that can test for both the coronavirus and the flu as the "influenza season" draws near.

The CDC said Wednesday it will withdraw its request for the "Emergency Use Authorization" of real-time diagnostic testing kits, which were used starting in February 2020 to detect signs of the coronavirus, by the end of the year.

"CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives," the agency said.

The U.S. has reported more than 34.4 million cases of the coronavirus since the pandemic began in 2020 and more than 610,000 deaths.

But while cases of COVID-19 soared nationwide, hospitalizations and deaths caused by influenza dropped.

According to data released by the CDC earlier this month, influenza mortality rates were significantly lower throughout 2020 than in previous years.

There were 646 deaths relating to the flu among adults reported in 2020, whereas in 2019 the CDC estimated that between 24,000 and 62,000 people died from influenza-related illnesses.

The CDC urged laboratories to "save both time and resources" by introducing kits that can determine and distinguish a positive test for the coronavirus and flu.

"CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses," the agency said Wednesday.

Laboratories will have until the close of 2021 before the CDC officially withdrawals its Emergency Use Authorization of the Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel.

A source from Gov. Newsom’s $100 million labs explained to the Globe in February about the high number of false-positive PCR tests:

“Results from a positive PCR test should be considered as a preliminary result only and doesn’t determine an active infection or hospitalization rates. Doctors typically order these tests when a patient shows symptoms and the doctor suspects the patient has a high probability of having the disease. Once a result comes back positive, it must be confirmed with another test in order to be considered definitive.

The concern with Covid screening is that none of these steps are taken. A positive PCR has little clinical significance and increases our case numbers without confirming the presence of an active infection. Without the expertise of a physician and a confirmatory assay, there is no way to determine if this is a true positive result.”

The Globe also reported on three doctors in Contra Costa County who were concerned with the excessive COVID PCR testing leading to high numbers of false-positive results. Dr. Michael deBoisblanc, Dr. Pete Mazolewski, and Dr. Brian Hopkins explain:

“PCR testing has proven to be seriously flawed when used to track disease prevalence, and the number of false-positive tests has contributed to fear panic and unnecessary quarantine of many. The peer review of the original Corman-Drosten PCR paper points out the serious flaws and conflicts of interest in the original article describing the PCR test (Peter Borger Et al., 11/27/2020). This paper is the basis for the PCR test used in the United States. On January 21, 2021, the World Health Organization published directions on the interpretation of a positive PCR test. They now caution about calling a test “positive” without symptoms, a confirmatory test, and physician oversight. They also cite the serious problems with high cycle thresholds leading to a high number of false positives. In short, they agree with what we argued last month.”

“With this information, your COVID positive case numbers are highly suspect, and using this data to determine which tier the population falls into has been, and continues to be, completely unreliable and arbitrary. Our recommendation is to move forward quickly with rapid antigen testing. These tests are less expensive and more appropriately sensitive to detect people with active, contagious disease.”

Six months later, the CDC pulls the PCR tests.

"Casedemic" Why COVID-19 Testing Is A Massive Waste of Resources

The mantra has been to test, test, and test some more since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, major concerns emerged right from the beginning about the tests being used to diagnose this infection, and questions have only multiplied since then.

As a rationale for keeping vast parts of the planet locked down for the better part of 2020, positive reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) experiments have been used.

This, despite the fact that PCR tests with high false result rates have proven surprisingly inaccurate and are not intended to be used as a diagnostic tool in the first place because they do not differentiate between inactive and "live" or reproductive viruses.

Dr. Mike Yeadon, Pfizer's former vice president, and scientific director, also went on record saying that false-positive results from faulty PCR tests are used to "produce a 'second wave' based on new cases,'" when a second wave is quite unlikely in fact.

A positive test does not actually mean that an active infection is present. As noted in a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and prevention publication on coronavirus and PCR testing dated July 13, 2020:

Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of an infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms.
The performance of this test has not been established for monitoring the treatment of 2019-nCoV infection.
This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.

So, what does the PCR test tell us, actually?

From your nasal cavity, the PCR swab extracts RNA. The reverse transcription of this RNA into DNA is then completed. The genetic snippets, however, are so tiny that they must be amplified to become discernible. Each round of amplification is called a loop.

Amplification over 35 cycles is known to be inaccurate and technically unjustified, but 45 cycles are set for Drosten tests and tests recommended by the World Health Organization.

"What this does is enhance some even negligible sequences of viral DNA that might be present to the extent that even if the viral load is extremely low or the virus is inactive, the test reads "positive. You end up with a much higher number of positive tests as a result of these excessive cycle thresholds than you would otherwise have.

We've had concerns with defective and tainted samples as well. German researchers rapidly developed a PCR test for the virus as soon as the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 became available in January 2020.

The New York Times announced in March 2020 that the initial test kits produced by the CDC had been found to be faulty. The Verge also stated that in turn, this defective CDC test became the basis for the WHO test, which the CDC eventually declined to use.

PCR Tests Cannot Detect Infection

Maybe most notably, inactive viruses and "live" or reproductive viruses can not be separated by PCR tests.

What that means is that infection can not be identified by PCR tests. It can't tell you whether you're sick at the moment, whether you're going to show symptoms in the near future, or whether you're infectious.

The tests may accumulate dead debris or inactive viral particles that do not pose any danger to the patient and others at all. What’s more, the test can pick up the presence of other coronaviruses, so a positive result may simply indicate that you’ve recuperated from a common cold in the past.

An "infection" is when a virus penetrates and replicates in a cell. Symptoms set in as the virus multiplies. A person is only contagious if the virus actually replicates. As long as the virus is inactive and not replicating, both the host and others are totally harmless.

Chances are, if you do not have symptoms, a positive test simply indicates that your body has detected inactive viral DNA. This will also suggest that you are not infectious and pose no threat to anyone.

A number of highly respected scientists around the world now believe, for all these reasons, that what we have is not a COVID-19 pandemic, but a PCR test pandemic. In his article 5, "Lies, Damned Lies and Health Statistics, The Deadly Danger of False Positives," on September 20, 2020, Yeadon explains why it is so troublesome to base our pandemic response on positive PCR tests.

In short, it seems like millions of individuals are actually found to be carrying inactive viral DNA that poses no danger to anyone and the global technocracy is using these test results to introduce a brand new economic and social structure focused on draconian surveillance and totalitarian controls.

“The test’s threshold is so high that it detects people with the live virus as well as those with a few genetic fragments left over from a past infection that no longer poses a risk. It’s like finding a hair in a room after a person left it, says Michael Mina, MD, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, up to 90% of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The New York Times found...

'We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,’ Dr. Mina said. ‘We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.’

But ‘yes’ or ‘no’ isn’t good enough, he added. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. ‘It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue,’ Dr. Mina said.”

Again, medical experts agree that any cycle threshold over 35 cycles makes the test too responsive, as it begins to pick up harmless inactive fragments of DNA at that point. Mina suggests 30 or less will be a more fair cutoff.

The CDC's own estimates indicate that it is highly impossible to detect live viruses in samples that have gone through more than 33 cycles, according to The New York Times, and studies reported in April 2020 concluded that patients with positive PCR tests with a cycle threshold above 33 were not infectious and could be released from the hospital or home isolation safely.

Importantly, when officials at the New York State Laboratory, the Wadsworth Center, reanalyzed research data at the request of The Times, they found that about 43 percent of the positive outcomes were removed by changing the threshold from 40 cycles to 35 cycles. A whopping 63% was removed by restricting it to 30 cycles. The Response to Vaccine adds:

“In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90% of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. ‘I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,’ he said.

‘I’m really shocked that it could be that high — the proportion of people with high CT value results,’ said Ashish Jha, MD, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. ‘Boy, does it really change the way we need to be thinking about testing’...

In late August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first rapid coronavirus test that doesn’t need any special computer equipment. Made by Abbot Laboratories, the 15-minute test [BinaxNOW] will sell for U.S. $5 but still requires a nasal swab to be taken by a health worker.

The Abbot test is the fourth rapid point-of-care test that looks for the presence of antigens rather than the virus’s genetic code as the PCR molecular tests do.“

Massive Waste of Resources

As Dr. Tom Jefferson and Professor Carl Henegan noted in an article in the Daily Mail on October 31, 2020, 16 mass PCR research was a huge waste of resource, as it does not provide us with the data we really need to know-who is contagious, how far is the virus spreading and how quickly does it spread?

Instead for weeks and months on end, it has contributed to economic damage from company shutdowns and isolating non-infectious individuals in their homes. Jefferson and Henegan say that about a month ago, they discussed their pandemic response plan with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and just introduced it again to him. They write, "We encourage him to pay attention and accept it," adding:

“There are only two things about which we can be certain: first, that lockdowns do not work in the long term... The idea that a month of economic hardship will permit some sort of ‘reset’, allowing us a brighter future, is a myth. What, when it ends, do we think will happen? Meanwhile, ever-increasing restrictions will destroy lives and livelihoods.
The second certainty is this: that we need to find a way out of the mess that does no more damage than the virus itself... Our strategy would be to tackle the four key failings.”

Four areas where we are failing as a society area are:

Addressing the concerns in the mass testing program of the government
Addressing' the calamity of confused and unreliable figures'
Secure and isolate the weak, especially the elderly, but also general and staff hospitalized patients, while allowing the rest to retain "some semblance of normal life"
Inform the public of the real and quantifiable lockdown costs that "destroy individuals just as surely as COVID-19"

There is real hope if we do these things that we will learn to live with the virus. That, after all, was supposed to be the plan,” Jefferson and Henegan note. "As far as testing is concerned, the pair calls for a national quality management testing program to ensure that reports are reliable, precise, and consistent.

Importantly, on positive/negative readings alone, we must not rely on. To assess who potentially presents an infectious risk, the findings must be analyzed in relation to other variables, such as the subject's age and whether they are symptomatic. At the end of their Daily Mail post, you can check the full details of their proposed proposal.

Lockdown hazards have been kept out of the public debate

Jefferson and Henegan are not the only ones who illustrate the fact that more damage and devastation than the virus itself is caused by the global lockdown strategy. In an article in The Federalist on June 16, 2020, James Lucas, a New York City attorney, wrote:

“If we’re going to allow models and modelers to dictate the entire nature of our society, one would hope that the models are as complete as possible. Yet the epidemiological models that have so transformed our world are seriously incomplete, and therefore fundamentally inadequate.

Any medical therapy is supposed to be tested for both efficacy and safety. There have been several studies examining the effectiveness of the lockdowns in combating the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with mixed conclusions.

So far, however, none of these studies or models have analyzed the safety side of the lockdown therapy. In response to questions from physician Sens. Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy, Dr. Anthony Fauci admits this side of the equation has not been accounted for in the models now driving our world.

As noted in an open letter recently signed by more than 600 health-care professionals, the public health costs from the lockdowns — described as a ‘mass casualty incident’ are real and growing.

These models are estimations based on existing research. The constantly changing projections of coronavirus deaths are extrapolations from research on previous epidemics. Yet modelers have no excuse for leaving evaluations of the lockdowns’ massive costs to public health out of their models.”

The Hidden Costs of Lockdowns

How does public safety impact "lockdown therapy"? Lucas highlights the following in his article:

Research23 by the Veterans Department has shown that delaying cancer treatment by only one month has contributed to a 20 percent rise in mortality due to elevated chronic disease rates due to unemployment, poverty, and placing non-COVID medical care on hold. Research23 Another study showed that each one-month delay in the diagnosis of breast cancer increased mortality by 10%.

Rising rates of problems with mental health due to unemployment and isolation

Increased suicide death rates were correlated with a two-fold to three-fold greater relative suicide risk in one study. "A more recent report reports that "deaths of misery" are related to maybe around 75,000 lockdowns in the U.S.

Reduced collective life span is often associated with shorter, unhealthier lives with extended unemployment. A prolonged economic shutdown could shorten the lifetime of 6.4 million Americans entering the labor market by an average of around two years, Hannes Schwandt, a health economics researcher at Northwestern University, reports. Lucas notes:

“If epidemiologists don’t care to take account of this toll, another profession must. A study28 just released by a group of South African actuaries estimates that the net reduction in lifespan from increased unemployment and poverty due to a national lockdown will exceed the increased lifespan due to lives saved from COVID-19 by the lockdown by a factor of 30 to 1.
In other words, each year of additional life attributable to isolating potential coronavirus victims in the lockdown comes at a cost of 30 years lost due to the negative public health effects of a lockdown...”

Education shortages are also linked to significantly shorter life spans and poorer health. High school drop-outs die on average nine years earlier than college graduates, and poorer students are disproportionately impacted by school closings.

Who Pays the Most?

As Lucas pointed out, modelers must therefore decide "on whom those costs fall," in addition to estimating the total cost to society, since the costs are not met equally by everyone. Those who are also the most disadvantaged, both financially and health-wise, such as those living near the poverty line, the chronically poor, individuals with mental illness, and minorities in general, are disproportionately affected by the effects of the lockdowns.

“Contrary to the PR slogan, we are NOT all in this together,” Lucas writes. “We need less insipid pro-lockdown propaganda extolling the virtues of the ‘essential’ workers, and more serious analysis of the enormous public health toll the lockdowns are imposing on them. Otherwise, we may come to see the era of coronavirus as simply the time where pro-lockdown elites sacrificed the working class31 to protect themselves.”

A Pandemic of Fearmongering

An October 28, 2020, article featured by the Ron Paul Institute points out that:

“Ever since the alleged pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum fear among the citizenry.
But the facts and the science simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the land. Yes, we do have a pandemic, but it’ a pandemic of ginned up pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact.”

The article notes that nine facts that can be backed up with evidence paint a very different image of the fear and dread being continuously drummed into the minds of naive people. In addition to the fact that PCR testing is practically useless, for all the reasons already mentioned, these data-backed facts include:

1. "As Dr. Lee Merritt explained in her August 2020 Disaster Preparedness Doctors 33 lecture, featured in How Medical Technocracy Made the Plandemic Inevitable," media and public health authorities tend to have deliberately combined "cases" or positive tests with the actual disease. A positive test is NOT a "case.

Medically speaking, a' case' refers to a person who is ill. It never referred to anybody who had no signs of illness. This well-established medical phrase, "case," has now been totally and arbitrarily redefined, all of a sudden, to mean anyone who tested positive for viral RNA involvement. That is not epidemiology, as Merritt noted. It is a scam.

2. According to the CDC34 and other research data,35 the COVID-19 survival rate is over 99%, and the vast majority of deaths occur in those over 70, which is close to normal life expectancy.

3. Analysis by the CDC indicates that 85 percent of patients testing positive for COVID-19 "sometimes or "still" wore face masks in the two weeks preceding their positive test. As noted in the Ron Paul article,36 "The only reasonable conclusion from this research is that cloth face masks provide little to no defense against infection with Covid-19."

4. Examples involve numerous regimens involving hydroxychloroquine with zinc and antibiotics, quercetin-based protocols, the MATH+ protocol, and nebulized hydrogen peroxide, and there are affordable, proven effective therapies for COVID-19.

5. The death rate has not risen despite pandemic deaths — Data37,38 show the overall all-cause mortality has remained steady during 2020 and doesn’t veer from the norm. In other words, COVID-19 has not killed off more of the population than would have died in any given year anyway.

As noted in the Ron Paul article, “According to the CDC as of early May 2020 the total number of deaths in the US was 944,251 from January 1 — April 30th. This is actually slightly lower than the number of deaths during the same period in 2017 when 946,067 total deaths were reported.”

15,000 Doctors and Scientists Call for End to Lockdowns

All in all, there are many reasons to believe that continuing lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates are entirely needless and that the trajectory of this pandemic epidemic, or the final death count, will not change drastically.

And with regard to universal PCR testing where people, whether they have symptoms or not, are checked every two weeks or even more often, this is simply a futile endeavor that generates useless results. It’s just a tool to spread fear, which in turn allows for the rapid implementation of the totalitarian control mechanisms required to pull off The Great Reset. Fortunately, more and more individuals are beginning to see through this plot now.

The Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for the end of all lockdowns and the introduction of a herd immunity approach to the pandemic, has now been signed by around 45,000 scientists and doctors worldwide, meaning that governments should encourage individuals who are not at substantial risk of severe COVID-19 disease to return to normal life, as the lockdown strategy has a devastating impact on the population. The declaration states:

“Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health...
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to coronavirus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this focused protection.”

The declaration points out that current lockdown policies will result in excess mortality in the future, primarily among younger people and the working class. As of November 5, 2020, The Great Barrington Declaration had been signed by 11,791 medical and public health scientists, 33,903 medical practitioners, and 617,685 “concerned citizens.”

Related Articles:

Elon Musk is a Great Example of Why Everyone Should Stop Testing

Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for COVID-19 four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020

What is the general population (no knowledge of symptoms) accuracy of a sars-cov2 PCR test & is it possible to generate a false positive if you simply run enough cycles?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020

Tesla creator Elon Musk says that while also testing negative, he has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, giving a skeptical view of the validity of the procedures.

In a series of tweets early Friday, after getting "mild sniffles & cough & moderate fever" in recent days, Musk said he had contradictory results from rapid "antigen" tests for Covid-19.

There is something incredibly bogus going on. He wrote, "Was screened four times today for covid." "Two tests returned negative, two returned positive. The same computer, the same test, the same nurse."

Musk, who dismissed fears about the pandemic and fought lockdown orders in California earlier this year, said he intended to take the more precise PCR test that had to be submitted for review to a laboratory.

In recent weeks, rapid antigen tests have gained ground due to laboratory backlogs, but they are less prone to small quantities of viruses and are more likely to produce a false negative.

Musk seemed to reject fears about the pandemic in March, saying that "my assumption is that the hysteria would do more damage than the virus."

Two months later, in California, he defied lockdown orders to reopen the assembly plant at Tesla, tempting authorities to arrest him.

For the first time after a successful crew test flight in May, Musk's space company SpaceX was scheduled to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station on Saturday.

For that mission, Musk was in the control room, but NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said Friday that procedure ruled out the involvement at the Kennedy Space Center of anyone who tested positive.

It is our policy for that person to quarantine and self-isolate when someone tests positive for Covid here at the Kennedy Space Center, and across NASA," he said in a press conference."

"So we expect that to happen. And, you know, we're looking at SpaceX to do some appropriate touch tracing."

Since October 31, the astronauts have been in quarantine, and Bridenstine did not want to predict whether if potential contact cases were found, there was a chance of postponing the mission.

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Comparing Flu, COVID, Allergies & Cold Symptoms

Black Market for Negative COVID-19 tests

New Study: Children Don’t Pass the Coronavirus on to Adults

According to a new study children don’t pass the Coronavirus on to adults. If true, given the fact that the mortality rate for kids from this virus is near zero.

Among the study's findings are:

A China/World Health Organization joint commission couldn’t find a single case of a child passing the virus to an adult.
Low case rates among children may be due more to higher numbers remaining asymptomatic, rather than a lower infection rate.
Analysis of Chinese data in confirmed and suspected cases showed that 32% of affected children aged 6-10 years were asymptomatic.
Precise details regarding
To date, only a handful of coronavirus deaths have been reported in children.
Very few newborns or infants contract Covid-19 and generally they do well in overcoming the virus.

The study is contained in a hard to read on mobile PDF so I added most of the text below.

In order to help facilitate the best possible care for children with COVID-19, we sought to aggregate and rapidly review all of the original research being produced pertinent to children, making it available to everyone. Speed has been essential, and in order to keep pace with the rapid production of new evidence, we have proceeded with informal, rapid, evidence synthesis. There have been a handful of studies which were obtained and deemed not suitable for inclusion, due to poor quality or patient overlap. A list of studies not included is available.

Our evidence summaries have undergone internal peer review, as well as being open to external review from our readers. We would like to highlight that due to the speed with which the evidence has been produced, much is of low quality. Many studies include few patients. There are 3 other significant issues:

Heterogeneous denominators. There is a significant amount of heterogeneity in the way cohorts or cases have been collected, and many of these are not directly comparable.
Overlap. Much of the current evidence has come from a few regions in China. We have tried to identify where cases series were at risk of including the same patients multiple times, but this remains a risk.
Non-peer reviewed evidence. Many included papers have come from pre-print servers. Whilst they appear of sufficient quality to be useful, they require caution when interpreting.

We hope this evidence review proves useful in helping manage children with COVID-19
Contributors: The project was coordinated by Alasdair Munro. Reviews were conducted by Alasdair Munro, Alison Boast, Henry Goldstein, Dani Hall, and Grace Leo. Digital/technical support was provided by Tessa Davis.

Epidemiology

Following the initial epidemiological data released from China, it appeared children were significantly less affected by infection with SARS-CoV-2 than their adult counterparts. This was reflected both in total case numbers, but also severity, with very few cases in young children and no deaths in children under 10yrs in the initial report. This finding has been reproduced in subsequent data from other countries, most notably Italy, which showed much lower rates of infection in children and no deaths in those under 30 years of age. Low numbers of childhood cases have been seen in the rest of Europe, as well as the USA, where 1/3 of childhood cases are in late adolescence. Some concerns exist that low case rates reflect selective testing of only the most unwell, however data from South Korea and subsequently Iceland which have undertaken widespread community testing, have also demonstrated significantly lower case numbers in children. This has also been seen in the Italian town of Vo, which screening 70% of its population and found 0 children <10 years positive, despite a 2.6% positive rate in the general population.

More detailed information has emerged from China into childhood severity of COVID-19. A large number of children appear asymptomatic. Critical illness was very rare (0.6%) and concentrated in the youngest infants. It should be noted that large numbers of “suspected” cases in this group leave room for a significant number of illnesses to have been caused by other, familiar respiratory viruses. In the USA CDC data, infants appear most likely to be hospitalised, although rates of PICU admission do not appear to be significantly different as yet. To date, deaths remain extremely rare in children from COVID-19, with only a handful of reported cases.

Transmission

Precise details regarding paediatric transmission remain unclear. Low case numbers in children suggest a more limited role than was initially feared. Contact tracing data from Shenzen in China demonstrated an equivalent attack rate in children as adults, however this has been contradicted by subsequent data in Japan which showed a significantly lower attack rate in children. This, coupled with low case numbers would suggest at least that children are less likely to acquire the disease. The role of children in passing the disease to others is unknown, in particular given large numbers of asymptomatic cases. Notably, the China/WHO joint commission could not recall episodes during contact tracing where transmission occurred from a child to an adult. A recent modelling study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (pre-print, not peer reviewed) however has suggested the most plausible explanation for low case rates was that children are more likely to be asymptomatic, rather than less likely to acquire the disease. Studies of multiple family clusters have revealed children were unlikely to be the index case, in Guanzhou, China, and internationally A SARS-CoV2 positive child in a cluster in the French alps did not transmit to anyone else, despite exposure to over 100 people.

Several studies have now shown that SARS-CoV-2 can be detected by PCR in the stool of affected infants for several weeks after symptoms have resolved. This has raised the possibility of faecal-oral transmission. Research from Germany failed to find any live, culturable virus in stool despite viral RNA being detectable, suggesting this represents viral debris rather than active virus. Further studies will be needed to shed further light on this.

Clinical Features

A significant proportion of children with COVID-19 do not appear to develop any symptoms, or have subclinical symptoms. In the absence of widespread community or serological testing, it is uncertain what this proportion is. The most detailed paediatric population data from China showed 13% of confirmed cases had no symptoms (cases detected by contact tracing). Considering both confirmed and suspected cases, 32% of children aged 6-10yrs were asymptomatic.

Clinical features in symptomatic children are somewhat different to adults. Children tend to have more mild illness. The most common presenting features are cough and fever, occurring in over half of symptomatic patients. Upper respiratory tract symptoms such as rhinorrhoea and sore throat are also relatively common, occurring in 30-40% of patients. It is not uncommon for children to have diarrhoea and/or vomiting (around 10% of cases), even in some cases as their sole presenting features.

Blood tests also show slightly different features to adults. Lymphocytopaenia is relatively rare in children, with the majority having normal or sometimes raised lymphocyte counts. Inflammatory markers such as CRP and Procalcitonin are often raised but only very mildly. Slight elevations in liver transaminases appears common.

Radiographic features in children are also somewhat different to their adult counterparts. Chest X-rays are often normal, and many CT chest scans are also normal. When present abnormalities are often less severe, however a reasonable number of children have bilateral pneumonia. Changes may be found on CT even in asymptomatic children. Common features in abnormal CT scans include mild, bilateral ground glass opacities, but with less peripheral predominance than is reportedly found in adults.

There appears to be little in the way of clinical signs in children to differentiate COVID-19 from other childhood respiratory virus infections.

Read more details on the report here

Study: Outdoor Virus Transmission Rates Near 0%

Crowdsourcing Science Inconsistencies, Economic & Legal Issues

Why Were Flu Cases Down During The 2020-21 COVID-19 Pandemic?

"Casedemic" Why COVID-19 Testing Is A Massive Waste of Resources

Elon Musk is a Great Example of Why Everyone Should Stop Testing

New Study: Children Don’t Pass the Coronavirus on to Adults

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