Cadell Walker hurried to get her 9-year-old daughter Solome vaccinated against COVID-19-not only to protect her, but to help stop the spread of the coronavirus and produce more dangerous variants.
“Loving your neighbor is something we truly believe in. We want to be good community members and we want to set an example of this kind of thinking for our daughter,” said the 40-year-old Louisville mother, who recently brought Solome Taken to a local middle school to shoot for her. “The only way to truly defeat COVID is for us all to work together for the greater good.” The scientists agreed. Every infection—whether in adults in Yemen or children in Kentucky—provides another opportunity for the virus to mutate. Protecting large new populations anywhere in the world limits these opportunities.
This effort has improved, and 28 million American children between the ages of 5 and 11 are now eligible to receive a child dose of Pfizer’s BioNTech vaccine. Actions in other places, such as Austria’s recent decision to require all adults to be vaccinated, and even the United States authorized all adults to receive booster shots on Friday, help to further reduce the chance of new infections.
Vaccinating children also means reducing silent transmission, because most people have no or mild symptoms when they contract the virus. Scientists say that when the virus spreads invisible, it will increase unabated. As more and more people are infected with it, the chances of new variants will increase. David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likened infection to “the lottery we bought for the virus.” Grand prize? A more dangerous variant than the infectious delta currently spreading.
He said: “The fewer people who are infected, the fewer lottery tickets we get, and the better we are at generating mutations,” he added, adding that people with weaker immune systems are more likely to have mutations. Systems that carry viruses for a long time.
Researchers disagree on the impact of children on the pandemic. Early research shows that they do not contribute much to the spread of the virus. But some experts say that this year children played an important role in spreading infectious variants such as alpha and delta. According to the estimates of the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Center, vaccinating children may have a real impact in the future. This is an organization that integrates university and medical research to model how the pandemic may develop. The center’s latest estimates show that from November this year to March 12, 2022, if no new mutations appear, vaccinating children between the ages of 5 and 11 will avoid approximately 430,000 COVID cases in the entire U.S. population. Katriona Shea, the co-leader of the project at Pennsylvania State University, said that if there is a mutation that is 50% higher than the delta transmission rate in late autumn, 860,000 cases will be avoided. “This is a huge impact.”
News Source : The Indian Express
