Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive immunity after Covid

Finally some glimmers of hope in moving past Covid.. if Omicron continues on its current track of highly infectious but less serious —- and infection confers reactive immunity to a variety of strains, we could be closer to the endemic but manageable end game. Good vaccines + mild severity illness are basically the best case.<p>What a stroke of luck that we are here vs a more infectious strain of Delta or some other nightmare that would keep this rolling.

We&#x27;re going to look back on our treatment of children these past 2 years as one of the greatest blunders in the history of public health policy.

Biochemist opinion: somewhat speculative, but what I take from this is that immunity in children makes them less likely than adults to shift from &#x27;removed&#x27; to &#x27;susceptible&#x27;, in the SIR model. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_SIR_model" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compartmental_models_in_epidem...</a>

So one of the main conclusions is that SARS-CoV-2 in children produces antibody responses to all the other human coronaviruses (this happens in adults too, but the effect is stronger in children)<p>In the discussion section they speculate that maybe recent infection with these other coronaviruses could give some level of protection against SARS-CoV-2, and that this could possibly explain some of the unusual-ness of the age-severity relationship, I.e. that very young children are not hit as hard by SARS-CoV-2 as by other diseases like the flu (relatively). That would be really interesting to see investigated carefully

So it&#x27;s the same as other coronaviruses like HCoV-OC43. There&#x27;s no vaccine available for those other ones so most of us get infected as youths, and the resulting immunity protects us as we age. But they can still be dangerous to immunologically naive older patients.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC7252012&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC7252012&#x2F;</a>

Serious question: should we let this more infectious but less dangerous run its course to achieve natural immunity? What are the arguments for and against this strategy?<p>I know that if it is 5 times less likely to put people in hospitals but 10 times more transmissible then there will be 2 times more people in hospitals, but are there more arguments?

Fantastic news. Actual science.<p>Thanks to these folk and gals, so much.

So the long Covid we’ve been afraid of for our children this whole time has actually been long term immunity? How ironic that our own push to vaccinate and save our children could put them in a worse position immunity-wise. Like rain on your wedding day.