Hello, and welcome to COVID, Quickly, a Scientific AmericanPodcast Series!
This is a quick update on the COVID epidemic. We will show you the science behind the most important questions about the disease. We help you understand the research.
The person is named Lewis, he is also known as Tanya Lewis.
Josh Fischman is my name.
We are Scientific American's senior health editors.
The second part of our back-to-school special episode is here. We're going to discuss why so few young children have gotten the vaccine.
How long should we be isolated when we become sick?
There are no comments at this time.
The risk of spreading COVID will increase now that many children are back in school. Only a small number of young children have received the vaccine.
That is correct. It has been available for all ages since mid- June. Only about a third of children are protected from vaccine-related diseases. The numbers are low for kids under five.
It is really low. It's so low, why?
There are many reasons. Parents of young children were asked by the Kaiser Family Foundation why they didn't want their child to be vaccine free. Parents said the vaccines were too new and not tested enough. Some people were concerned about having to stay home and look after their child if they had side effects. About 1 in 10 parents said they didn't think their child needed a vaccine because they weren't concerned about COVID anymore.
Why weren't they worried about carbon dioxide?
Since the beginning of the Pandemic, some experts and media have said that kids don't get sick from COVID if they don't have any underlying health conditions. That is true at times. More than 1,400 children have died from the disease in the United States.
Some people have been hospitalized with a condition called MIS-C, which affects many different organs, and some kids have developed long carbon dioxide levels. It is possible to protect kids against them by being vaccine free.
Lewis is absolutely correct. Many parents have stopped following the news about COVID because of the message that it is not a concern for them. They just want to get back to normal, like going back to school. Many parents of kids who have already had vaccine don't think it's important to get it
Parents were more concerned with the vaccine than with COVID.
That is correct. I talked to a few parents of young children who were unsure of whether or not to give their child a vaccine. The mother of a two-year-old boy in Massachusetts told me that her son had a vaccine in May. She and her husband haven't had himvaccinated because he probably had some immunity from the disease. She said her husband was concerned about the risk of an extremely rare side effect because her son was premature and she had an extremely rare side effect during her pregnancies.
That is fascinating. Vaccines are generally very safe and have very rare side effects. 1,400 deaths can be caused by COVID itself. Some kids get serious diseases.
Lewis said that they do. Every parent has to make a decision at the end of the day about what risk their child is at. Vaccination is a very effective way to lower the small risk of severe illness in children as we head into another fall and winter with this virus.
Booster shots that target Omicron have been approved by the FDA. Younger kids will have to wait a bit longer for the new ones because they are only for adults and kids 12 and over.
There are no comments at this time.
Lewis spent five days isolated. If you get Covid, you are supposed to keep to yourself for at least a week. Five days may not be enough.
It might be more like eight days, you know what I mean. According to recent research, that is how long you could be infectious.
Let's go back a little. Keeping the disease from spreading to other people is one of the reasons for isolation. The CDC said in August that they would be isolating from the start of symptoms.
You can go out if you haven't had a high for a day and other symptoms have improved. You have to wear a mask for five days if you do.
The official line is that.
You are about to tell us that is not the scientific line.
The man said that he had it. The experts said there was a good chance that you could still spread the virus after 5 days. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that people with the Omicron variant were free of the infectious virus 8 days after their first symptom.
The study looked at the viral loads of people with the alpha anddelta variant. About two-thirds of them would be infectious for five days. The risk lasted for seven days. There are other works pointing in the same direction.
The importance of the second part of the CDC guidance is highlighted by that. There are masks like those.
The CDC put the mask in there because of that. The 5-day window was a bit squishy, and the 8-day window was a tad bit squishy as well. Is it a bit more or a bit less? The risk of spreading was reduced by the end of the study.
When people stop being infectious, rapid antigen tests can show them.
The CDC does not advise testing to leave isolation.
It is not. Two tests are quite accurate if you take them 48 hours apart, according to the FDA. They can spot the virus and let you know when it is gone.
The CDC didn't want to make tests a barrier to getting out of your house because it's hard masks work If you go to a library, a community center, or a drug store, you can wear one. Don't use them alone. You will keep everyone safe if you do that.
That's right, --
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