If you test positive, why make your kid go through that? If you test positive and you are both sick, you can presume you've caught the same thing.
In any case, I would expect kids to be tested after adults in most cases during the shelter in place
The only way to get this outcome is if negative kids are less likely to be PCR tested than negative adults, or if positive kids are more likely to be PCR tested than positive adults, or both.
From what I understand, the overwhelming majority of kids with covid do not require any treatment whatsoever, with only a small handful of anecdotes of kids having bad symptoms.
Just don't let junior visit grandma.
Most kids have no symptoms. If a kid has symptoms, they have a risk of them progressing, and COVID symptoms tend to progress fairly suddenly (or, at least, fairly silently, if you aren't continuously tracking O2 says, which results in a sudden-seeming transition from “mild symptoms”, or even no noticeable symptoms, to catastrophic symptoms.) While kids are far more likely to be completely asymptomatic, testing if they are exposed to determine need for monitoring, especially if they are already noticeably ill (and, thus, if you presumed they are infected, equally ought to be presumed to have missed the high probability in their age group of getting by completely asymptomatic.)
Some of this research is rather worrisome. But it's important to not overstate what it says: we find evidence of lung damage in imagery of a small proportion of asymptomatic adults. (I'm not aware of any imaging study of asymptomatic children).
How significant these imagery findings are, what proportion is from COVID-19 (because if you image a bunch of people without COVID-19 you're going to find some weird things in imagery, too), and what proportion of adults infected would have this are unknown (even the asymptomatic adults who manage to get a positive test result and enroll in an imaging study are not typical). Let alone knowing how common this would be in children.
if the kid turns out to be that small percentage that do need intensive care - you would be kicking yourself.
kids have died from covid complications, they are not immune.
Why is this so hard to grasp? Being a disease carrier is a problem even if the kid doesn't show symptoms, especially it's been established that covid is transmissible with no symptoms.
The ONLY reason we test is to control community spread. Covid doesn't really have any specific treatments, it gets managed the same way you manage a flu patient. There's near zero value in the individual information about an infection.
In an idea situation (i.e. where the pandemic hasn't outstripped test bandwidth, which is true now in almost all of asia, most of europe, and some areas of the US like NYC) you test everyone who gets sick with covid-like symptoms, and for every positive you then go and test everyone who had meaningful contact with them.
You absolutely don't skip tests because you can reasonably assume a positive. That's missing the point entirely.
At present. There are lots of reports about lingering effects. And large portions of asymptomatics studied have penumonia.
You don’t feel tis pneumonia as a symptoms, and if covid damages vascular or brain tissue, you won’t feel that directly either. But it could well be an issue down the road, and knowing if you or your kid had coronavirus could help future treatments.
Most likely, you'd only get the kid(s) tested in that case if you were seeking medical care because it was pretty bad, or the tests were encouraged by a contact tracing regime. The first part would lead towards higher positivity results, and the second towards lower. With no details on who go tests / what their motive for testing was, we just don't know.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason positivity rate matters.
If a positivity rate is too high, that may indicate that the state is only testing the sickest patients who seek medical attention, and is not casting a wide enough net to know how much of the virus is spreading within its communities. A low rate of positivity in testing data can be seen as a sign that a state has sufficient testing capacity for the size of their outbreak and is testing enough of its population to make informed decisions about reopening. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/testing-positivity
if you know you are sick with covid, would you let your kid potentially die from the disease as well?
Interestingly enough, my daughter got sick and we thought it was strep. She ended up getting tested for strep and covid in one day.
The reason people track the "positive test rate" isn't to make deductions about the population directly, it's to provide data on how well testing and tracing is working. In NYC right now, positive tests are coming back at about 1%. That is, almost everyone who they think "might" have covid actually doesn't (they have the flu, or if they're a contact they didn't get infected). That's good, because it means the test and trace control is working and the probability of a person who does not get tested being infected is very low.
In FL, things are out of control. Getting back a 30% positive rate means that you're really only catching the cases that come in the door. It means that there are probably a ton that you aren't catching, because you can't test enough to keep up.
Which health experts? Why do they fear this?
"Alina Alonso, the health department director of Palm Beach County, reportedly told county commissioners on Tuesday that the long-term consequences of coronavirus in children are unknown."
That doesn't sound like fear to me, and in some respects the article comes off on me as though the author is attempting to elicit fear where there should be none. I am not a parent myself, but if there's one thing I know about them it's that they tend to be VERY fearful when it comes to their children's safety. If the author is deliberately toying with that then the ought to be ashamed.
Modern medicine had seen before severe cardiovascular accidents and is aware of what a damage in young arteries or heart can produce. Some tissues can self-repair better than other.
The origin is new, but the consequences of damage on any main organ are well studied.
COVID-19 is very obviously shaping up to be the defining issue of this election cycle. Mexico is very relieved. But as we are all aware - as the election goes, so goes the media.
Basically, this means that they don't have enough testing capacity and are testing only when they must.
It is broken down by age group.
Also it could point to less exposure to common cold antibodies, this is the south. Common cold antibodies are believed to be the cause for the low IFR percentages worldwide.
a) are better at catching it (but not better at spreading it) than adults
b) have a larger window in which they "test positive" or
c) parents are the ones infecting children - that is to say that parents and children both test positive for the same duration of time, but parents get it and get over it first.