Right, so instead of a trickle of hospitalized kids over 3 years, all those kids are sick at the same time, pushing the limits of hospital capacity.
Additionally, some kids may be more susceptible to respiratory illnesses due to having had covid. (Ask @twig93 how that works.) So some of those kids are sicker than they might otherwise have been.
The good news in terms of fewer/shorter public mask mandates is that this is likely a one-time lump in illness. And even better, there’s an RSV vaccine in the works.
That’s a great graphic. It appears to NOT be cumulative, is that right? I wonder how that compares to pre-pandemic years. You’d think the south would have an advantage in terms of spending more time outside this time of year, but I don’t know if that’s accurate.
Scrolling through the CDC map website, I note that the pattern of the southeast looking ugly around this point in flu season seems to have been a thing even before COVID.
What makes you think that? Practically everyone I know who had Covid got it from their kid or got it from someone who got it from their kid. I thought schools were significant in the spread once they opened back up.
I don’t think many kids were hospitalized because they have young healthy non-smoking lungs and immune systems. But I think a crap ton of kids had Covid.
There are two major pathways of immune response, the innate response and the adaptive response. The adaptive response includes antibodies, T cells, b cells, and all that stuff that you develop after you’ve been exposed to an antigen. The innate response is stuff like fever and interferon, etc.
Presumably because kids don’t yet have a full contingent of antibodies and stuff, they have a much more active innate immune system than adults. That’s why it’s normal for kids to spike fevers all the time. The innate response is very effective against covid, and that’s a major reason it’s less severe in kids.
It’s not that the innate system wears out, or becomes unhealthy, it’s just that our immune system is metabolically expensive, and like every other animal, our bodies try to conserve resources, so as we age the body relies more heavily on the adaptive immune system (which in most situations has already seen most of the pathogens you need to deal with) and the innate response it tamped down.
I guess I was thinking the majority of kids hospitalized with RSV — those not exposed prior to Covid — would be under school age. It’s not usually something I hear about with older kids. How many babies got Covid & the parents actually knew it? (The ones I heard about were newborns who got it IN the hospital. But again, anecdotal.)
Incidentally my circle has lots of people who don’t have school aged kids at home and many of them got Covid—obviously none from their kids.
Exposed to Covid? RSV? Those babies weren’t masked so…
If most babies were in daycare and therefore exposed to normal illnesses then we need to rethink the reason for the decline (during Covid) and surge (now) of RSV.
So you are thinking that if they had Covid they have a worse case of RSV? Did most people test their infants for Covid if all they had was mild symptoms? If not, how would we know?
(*I did look up the fact that most RSV hospitalizations are in the under 5 set. It seems like the younger they are when they get it the more likely they are to be hospitalized.)
I don’t know about RSV specifically, but it does seem like generally being recovered from Covid makes you more susceptible to other crap (compared to never having had Covid).
And I dispute the notion that most kids haven’t had Covid. Two years ago that may have been true, but I don’t think it is now.
