sycasey said:Big C said:sycasey said:
This was a good scientific explainer on why COVID-19 was harder on adults than on kids (something people here found hard to understand at times):An absolutely brilliant essay by @dylanhmorris. Explains why kids handle this virus so well, and many other insights.
— Joseph Allen (@j_g_allen) May 23, 2021
Thanks to @zeynep for hosting this.https://t.co/eKJ7Ns4VkA
Basically, when you're young your immune system is really agile and able to quickly adapt to new viruses. As you get older it becomes less so, but because you've already faced a bunch of viruses in your life your body is able to draw upon its prior experience in fighting similar ones, so you don't get sick from common colds as often. I might compare this to an athlete, where you actually might have your best speed and agility as a teenager, but you have little experience at playing the game so you make a lot of mistakes. Then you lose physical ability as you age but can use veteran savvy to keep competing. If you're both forced to compete in a brand new game, though, the younger athlete would probably have the advantage.
That's the problem when you introduce a totally new "novel" virus and older immune systems have no experience with it. Old people get destroyed by it, until a vaccine can teach their systems how to fight it. Kids, with their more agile immune systems, are less affected because more of them were able to adapt naturally and fight it off. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be vaccinated, because SOME kids might still get it and be at risk. But it does explain the different responses in age groups.
Didn't a lot of young people die from the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920? How does this explainer account for that?
(not sure about kids, but pretty sure about younger people, in general)
Just asking. My bad if this was explained deep inside the "explainer".
It doesn't talk about Spanish Flu. That's a good question.
Would love to understand why some of the newer variants have been harder on kids than the base virus.