Op ed out in UK:
Pandemic 2.0 – Where do we go from here? The Delta variant and the young.
Exerpt: "For the young, a rapidly growing body of evidence illustrates the risk of long-term complications, including organ damage. A small number of children with Covid-19 are affected by Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS-C), which commonly leads to cardiac dysfunction, myocarditis, coronary artery dilation, and aneurysms. With larger infection numbers, we will likely see many more of these cases.
SARS-CoV-2 is not just a respiratory virus, and it has been suggested that the coronavirus itself enters the brain via the olfactory route. In one recent preprint, a large controlled study of brain scans demonstrated loss of grey matter in certain parts of the brain following Covid-19, especially in areas regulating smell. Loss of brain tissue was also found in people with mild disease; for those with more severe disease, tissue loss occurred also in memory-related parts of the brain. In a recent study on adults, reduced memory was reported by 12 percent of participants eight months post-Covid. Cognitive deficits have been reported in a study of 90,000 people after Covid-19 infection. An international consortium to study the short-and long-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 on the central nervous system, supported by the WHO, is now also investigating whether Covid-19 may increase the risk of developing dementia in the longer term.
It is still not known how the results from these studies relate to children and young people. However, examining children hospitalised with COVID-19 prior to Delta, the occurrence of neurological or psychiatric effects from COVID-19 was shown to be four times more common for children and adolescents compared to adults. And, in a recent study published in Nature, 13 percent of home-isolated young adults, aged 16–30 years reported reduced concentration at six months, 11 percent had memory problems, and more than half still experienced one or more symptoms at six months. Such symptoms are commonly reported in those suffering from Long Covid and may have a deleterious impact on education, cognitive and social development, in spite of not being reflected in the number of hospitalizations and deaths. These are problems that can still lead to considerable human, societal and economic cost in the short, medium, and long term.
In this scenario of high risk and uncertainty, and with prevention soon available, mass infection of the young is not an ethically defensible option."
With references.
Gunhild Nyborg | Andrew Ewing | Yaneer Bar-Yam | Cécile Philippe | Matthias F. Schneider | Shu-Ti Chiou | Sunil Raina | Bengt Nordén | Sigurd Bergmann
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