| State Hotspots: Arizona: 11% of total cases in those younger than 20. California: 8.4% in those younger than 18. Mississippi: 9.4% in those under 18. Washington state: 11% in those 20 and younger. Tennessee: 4.5% of cases involving those 10 and under, and 11% for those 11 through 20. |
Regional authorities are also seeing the surge. Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, is an epicenter of the recent rise in U.S. cases. There, those younger than 20 made up 11.4% of about 49,000 cases, according to the county’s public health department. Children up to age 9 represented 4.1%.
Studies have found that children tend not to suffer from severe coronavirus symptoms as often as adults, but there remain unknowns.
I don’t know about other states, but in California young Latino and African Americans are hugely over-represented in positive cases and there are rising numbers of them being hospitalized.
It’s not just the younger kids. It’s also their parents:
Age data collected from state health departments by Bloomberg shows that the oldest Americans now represent a lower percentage of infections than they did at the start of the outbreak. The surge in recent cases is led by the group most likely to have school-aged children, those in their 20s, 30s and up to their 50s in some states.
At the same time, the prevalence in children has risen as testing has become more available to those with mild or no symptoms.
What they don’t know yet is whether kids can spread COVID the way they spread influenza and the common cold. They’re studying it now and hopefully, the data will be available soon. That’s a huge consideration in how they should open schools. But it’s also a huge consideration in how we think about the well-being of families and the health of kids generally.
Nobody really knows yet what this virus might be doing to people long term or how it affects growing children and young adults, even if they have only mild symptoms. It’s an ass-kicking disease that every reputable single scientist and medical doctor tells us has lots of weird characteristics they’ve just never seen before.
People who are being cavalier about this are reckless and foolhardy. People like this: