Wider collateral damage to children in the UK because of the social distancing [...] COVID-19, 2020, Crawley et al. And other papers by Crawley et al

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Wider collateral damage to children in the UK because of the social distancing measures designed to reduce the impact of COVID-19 in adults
  1. Esther Crawley1,
  2. Maria Loades1,2,
  3. Gene Feder3,
  4. Stuart Logan4,
  5. Sabi Redwood5,
  6. John Macleod2
In the UK, paediatricians are increasingly concerned that parental worries over visiting healthcare centres are leading to a drop in vaccination rates and the late presentation of serious illness in children. This is likely to cause avoidable deaths and illness in the short and long term, a form of collateral damage from the COVID-19 emergency. In Italy, hospital statistics show a substantial decrease in paediatric emergency visits compared with the same time in 2018 and 2019 of between 73% and 78%.1 In April 2020, both the Clinical Commissioning Groups and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health provided guidance for general practitioners and paediatricians in England that the threshold for face-to-face assessment hospital referrals in children should not change because of the COVID-19 pandemic.2 This intervention is welcome; however, we remain concerned about wider, perhaps less immediately visible collateral damage of strategies used against COVID-19 on vulnerable children.

The Cambridge dictionary defines collateral damage as the ‘unintentional deaths and injuries of people who are not soldiers, and damage that is caused to their homes, hospitals, schools, etc’. In the fight against coronavirus, children are being put at risk, in order to reduce the spread of a disease that mainly causes direct harm to adults.
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https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/content/4/1/e000701


Hmm, reminds me a bit of her Tedx talk.

We believe that the social distancing measures introduced in the UK and elsewhere, may marginally reduce the infection rate in adults but harms children.
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Improving video and online access to services for which there is some evidence of effectiveness (such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) from CAMHS) could improve children’s resilience.
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Didn't the UK used to have social distancing between adults and children, for generations.

It was called boarding schools, and nannies.

It was the children who weren't socially distanced, from adults, using these or similar methods that ended up with health problems, as it generally meant they were poor, and 'poor' is not good for health, the average age of death was quite a lot lower then.

I wonder if that's were the word poorly came from.
 
I was trying to figure out the point of this meandering thought salad and, yeah, it's a sales pitch:
Improving video and online access to services for which there is some evidence of effectiveness (such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) from CAMHS) could improve children’s resilience
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In a way this is good for the wellness industry since those children will be in need of more wellness after having been subjected to wellness, kinda like selling both the poison and the cure, but with the added twist that the cure is also poison.

Bold. Psychopathic. But bold.
 
I don't understand how an educated person can be so stupid as to say:
We believe that the social distancing measures introduced in the UK and elsewhere, may marginally reduce the infection rate in adults but harms children.

The harm to children is not from the social distancing. It is from the absence of functioning healthcare due to lack of applying social distancing when it was first needed. Healthcare staff are doing Covid tests on people. They could be doing vaccinations if there weren't thousands upon thousands of unnecessary Covid cases.

There is some strange mindset here that has allegiance to some peculiarly distorted psychological perspective - psychopathology in fact. It almost sounds like sour grapes from those whose advice turned out to be disastrous.
 
Amw66 said:
And the evidence for the effectiveness of CBT and online CBT ?
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Ironically, it's basically right there in the text: "it could improve". Don't ask about what "improve" means, though, by her own admission she doesn't know and won't commit to a specific thing because then that could be tested and measured, thus removing the suspension of disbelief.

That's pretty much it. I mean literally it's the whole of the evidence. It "could" help. It's the same evidence for everything it's used on. Which is also accurate of water therapy. It definitely works on dehydration. So it "could" help any condition as long as it includes dehydration (or if by random chance the patient is also dehydrated). That's about the whole of it.

Which seems like a bit of an oversight seeing as it's commonly used as a replacement to actual medicine but I'm not sure the word applies when it's deliberate.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
I don't understand how an educated person can be so stupid as to say:
We believe that the social distancing measures introduced in the UK and elsewhere, may marginally reduce the infection rate in adults but harms children.

The harm to children is not from the social distancing. It is from the absence of functioning healthcare due to lack of applying social distancing when it was first needed. Healthcare staff are doing Covid tests on people. They could be doing vaccinations if there weren't thousands upon thousands of unnecessary Covid cases.

There is some strange mindset here that has allegiance to some peculiarly distorted psychological perspective - psychopathology in fact. It almost sounds like sour grapes from those whose advice turned out to be disastrous.
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And also the claim that social distancing will only "marginally" improve the infection rate in adults!?!?!?
 
It therefore seems likely that the decisions on social distancing contravene the UN Convention of the child. This convention states (article 3): “In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration." We believe that the social distancing measures introduced in the UK and elsewhere, may marginally reduce the infection rate in adults but harms children. We do not believe that the “best interest of the child” are the “primary consideration” and therefore these actions do not comply with this convention.
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1) I hardly think that the authors of this paper are qualified to judge the effectiveness of social distancing measures in reducing infection rates.

2) Children are not the only people in the world, for fuck's sake, I'm pretty sure that that article of that UN convention wasn't intended to mean that children's mental health should be prioritised over adults' lives.

3) Anyway they've omitted the fact that dying parents is not in children's best interest.

4) And then there's the potential for long-term sequelae in post-covid patients, which if too prevalent could end up totally crashing the functioning of society, which I'm sure would be bad for children's wellbeing too.

5) The good news is that this is the sort of thing that LOTS of scientists and laypeople will call bullshit (if they come across the paper and read that section of it).

6) Oh also I've spotted two proofreading errors just in that paragraph.
 
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Couple I know are currently having difficulty getting MMR vaccine. Mum and baby had moved to her parents in Devon as flat in London had mould and mice, joined a week or so later by Dad, so they have been there 8 weeks or so already, but local GP receptionist is saying she must wait for MMR until she returns to usual GP!!
 
What I suspect this paper does not point out is that the rate of vaccination has been dropping off anyway because of the chaotic nature of community health care (not antivaxx probably). Parents have been having trouble getting their children vaccinated for a few years now. And the story above shows clearly that this has nothing to do with social distancing. It is the usual 'jobsworth' attitude of healthcare administrators whose paid function is to stop things from happening to save money.
 
I think there is a legitimate area of concern here in some instance when children are normally looked after for most of the time in special schools with individual assistance and who may have serious behavioural and/or physical problems, and are now at home, perhaps with a single parent with other children to look after too, and with no help.

There is also a legitimate area of concern with children in families where there is already psychological or physical abuse and who are now cooped up together with their abusers 24/7.

I heard a headteacher of a special school and a parent describing the fact that in his school it is impossible to social distance because of the behavioural problems and care needs of the children, yet most of those children are now stuck at home getting no help.

I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think we should dismiss the suggestion that social distancing is harming some children.

All I can think of is that the government should have put in place a local authority run scheme of home visitors to help the parents in those situations, equivalent to the carers who visit and help disabled adults. Theoretically in the UK schools are supposed to be still catering for children with special needs and those being overseen by social workers, but I gather that's not happening in many cases.
 
Trish said:
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think we should dismiss the suggestion that social distancing is harming some children.
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I don´t say not to pay attention to the virus,

but the virus does not seem to be of puplic danger.


In an additional detail, as soon as there are any hints that children are not substantial transmitters, this should matter immediately.

(And this may be even an approach from the wrong side.)
 
We believe that the social distancing measures introduced in the UK and elsewhere, may marginally reduce the infection rate in adults but harms children.
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[my bold]

Where is their sound scientific evidence that social distancing is only having a marginal effect on reducing infection rate? If they really believe this then surely they are arguing that social distancing is unnecessary. Use of the word 'may' sounds like typical get-out-of-jail-card language. I fully agree that the consequences of social distancing can have a detrimental effect on children, but it's nonsense to downplay the other side of the equation. Such linguistic chicanery seems locked into the DNA of some folk.
 
spinoza577 said:
as soon as there are any hints that children are not substantial transmitters, this should matter immediately.
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A study out of Germany recently seemed to suggest that children can carry the virus and transmit it at the same rate as adults they are generally less ill with symptoms though. We believe we contracted it in our household from my daughters school - she only had two days of very mild symptoms whereas 45 days in myself and her dad are still struggling to recover (untested, suspected cases).

I agree with Trish that many children are vulnerable right now and people are not getting the support they need. But many children also have health problems that make them vulnerable to the virus, or they have a vulnerable parent or grandparent that they live with etc. This mad rush to open schools is crazy.
Also just thinking about the new cases of children being admitted to ICU units across the globe for a weird possibly related illness?
 
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