> <i>"I think one thing is that we essentially sheltered a lot of these children during Covid," Combs said.
"So there's a theory that their immune systems didn't have the normal low-lying, routine level of exposure to the normal routine viruses like rhinovirus, so they weren't able to mount those kind of micro-responses to viruses and keep themselves ticking over," she added.
"Essentially it was like a bubble child, right? You've had them contained. You've had them quarantined ... and then all of a sudden we released these children. They're often in summer camps and we're even looking at going back to school. So all of a sudden these relatively naive immune systems that have kind of been resting on their laurels for the past 18 months are forced to confront the normal load of viruses and it's just that much harder to fight them."</i><p>Between this and kids missing swimming lessons for the past 18 months, I would wager that more children will be killed by downstream effects of efforts to isolate them from exposure to Covid than would have died from Covid itself.