My daughter was born at 29 weeks. After getting out of NICU, our neonatologist strongly recommended Palivizumab to give her by immunity as RSV for premies is bad news. The catch is that insurance didnt cover it and it cost about 1300 SGD per dose.

Or maybe it’s less dangerous for older children because they were already exposed as younger children.

Immunology is really tricky because the human immune system is quite complex. These kinds of findings sadly need to be taken with a grain of salt.

When my then 4 month-old was hospitalized with RSV last year, the medical staff told us the main issue with RSV in very young children (under 6 months) is that their respiratory system is still immature. That is, their airways are still very small and their coughs are less productive. This means that RSV symptoms that would be manageable for an older child can become potentially life threatening for the very young.

For example, if your toddler has a stuffy nose, you can help them to blow it. For an infant, you need a tool to suction their nose which can be difficult to do. That same stuffy nose might cause poor feeding and dehydration which on top of the general breathing issues caused by RSV can lead to a rapid deterioration in the infant's health.

Even with all the supportive care (oxygen, regular suctioning, a feeding tube), it took a full 5 days in the hospital for our infant to recover.

My first-hand experience with this seems to be consistent with larger trends as well. A recent CDC presentation shows that children age 0-5 months are hospitalized by RSV at far higher rates than any other age group. [1]

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

Toddlers have more robust immune systems than infants in multiple different ways. There's no evidence for your hypothesis.

Evidence with a sample size of 1: I have a pandemic toddler and a baby. Toddler was not sick once in first 18 months. Both just got RSV. Toddler was fine after a couple days. Infant was in ER and is still having effects weeks later.

If the child gets RSV right as their maternal antibodies (to RSV) start fading, it could actually be less severe. It happened with polio, though polio has much more susceptibility to antibodies circulating in the blood if all you care about is severe disease.

A child receiving maternal immunoglobulins from breast milk during the first year postpartum who is exposed to RSV might not even become noticeably ill or present as a mild cold. Nevertheless the exposure will help teach their developing immune system.

None of that is to downplay the potentially fatal seriousness of RSV. The immune system is imperfect after all. The NICU is maybe the most depressing place I’ve ever been in my life and my heart goes out for every parent who has or has had a child there or in any pediatric ICU.

There's a nice big middle ground between solitary confinement and doing nothing.

I'd love to see schools take a serious look at air movement and filtration.

We didn't take a middle ground. Kids (the poorest and most disadvantaged) suffered a massive, irrecoverable learning loss under the mandates of public health experts.

Or maybe they were free to focus on their favorite hobbies and started a successful career. Nobody knows. Irrecoverable seems a word too extreme in any case

> Or maybe they were free to focus on their favorite hobbies and started a successful career

yea the young kids who are forming hobbies, instead of say learning to read or talk

Lets not overdramatize and we will have a stronger speech.

To start, kids don't learn how to talk in the school. Not normally and if they are so young as to not being able to talk still, school is basically a convenience parking for toddlers.

We shouldn't adjust the laws to the saddest history that we can find. Treating everybody in a population as if all of them were outliers does not give the desired results.

Children are able to learn in lots of places apart of the school. Yes, is a fact. They can learn a lot for example from their grandpas and grandma. Of course, as long as their grandparents are alive because they were smarter than the fake news and the 'magufo' crew.

We have plenty of numbers now that show the effects of lockdown on kids.

The effects are especially clear for the disadvantaged who struggled before.

And all of this could easily have been predicted. Maybe people pointed it out, even. Sadly they were deplatformed, mocked, called “grandma killers” and kicked out of the conversation.

> Or maybe they were free to focus on their favorite hobbies and started a successful career.

Kinda hard to do if you are trapped at home with an abusive family. For many kids school is not just education but a sanctuary from a broken home.

It takes a lot of privilege to support closing schools for any duration of time—especially two years.

We absolutely took a middle ground. Schools could've stayed closed much longer, masks could've been required much longer, vaccines could've been made mandatory. We prioritized cleaning over ventilation, to our severe detriment.

Deeming it "irrecoverable" requires a time machine; one of the most frustrating parts about dealing with child development is the impacts take decades to sort out, in sometimes surprising fashion.

> We absolutely took a middle ground.

Europe apparently operated a lot less draconian wrt schools, never really closed down & things worked out pretty well. The science was pretty clear even from early on but democrats in US said georgia reopening schools was "an exercise in human sacrifice." You don't need a middle ground for the least vulnerable age-range for covid.

> Deeming it "irrecoverable" requires a time machine

what? it's irrecoverable because you never get back lost time, the past is settled and kids lost out on crucial brain development windows

> Europe apparently operated a lot less draconian wrt schools, never really closed down & things worked out pretty well.

I certainly would've preferred this; here we kept the bars open, but closed the schools. Both are middle grounds, I preferred Europe's prioritization. At the time these decisions were being made, some folks talked about R0 being like a budget - you want it under one, and each mitigation gets you part of the way there. I was disappointed to see the US prioritize economy over kids; much of the world made the opposite choice, and provided more income supports to keep kids in school.

> You don't need a middle ground for the least vulnerable age-range for covid.

This would be a great point if kids lived alone, with no vulnerable folks at home.

> it's irrecoverable because you never get back lost time

People recover from lost time frequently. If your teacher is sick and you have a substitute teacher for a couple days, that time gets made up. There's summer school, enrichment programs, etc. Very little of what kids learn in school has to be learned in one specific set of months; there's a pretty large range in exact ages within a single grade, even.

It'll be years, maybe decades before we know how plastic child development is in this regard. Right now, there are massive unknowns in evaluating all of this.

> People recover from lost time frequently.

Nope. They fall behind and don't catch up. https://www.edweek.org/education/students-who-struggle-early...

There's likely to be a significant difference between how teachers treat "one student is behind their peers" and "this entire class didn't get much of third grade".

Standardized testing isn't changing, common core hasn't shifted things back two years. We are just leaving them behind.