EDITORIAL: Findings on virus, kids relevant to lockdown policies

As the lockdown enters week seven, Nevadans await the re-emergence of Gov. Steve Sisolak in hopes he will lift the dense fog obscuring the details of his coronavirus strategy. His next irregularly scheduled news briefing has been pushed back to Thursday, a full nine days after his last.

In the interim, the governor announced this week that Nevada and Colorado have joined a Western state compact that includes California, Washington and Oregon on coordinating the reopening of their economies. What this means in real terms is unclear — as is the rationale behind excluding GOP governors in Arizona, Utah or Idaho from the discussion. Colorado is one of the few Democratic-led states that has begun to initiate an economic thaw, so perhaps that’s a good sign.

Gov. Sisolak, no doubt acting in good faith, insists he will base all decisions on “science” when it comes to deciding how the state will proceed on matters including lockdowns and openings. But let’s hope he and his advisers consider all relevant research when crafting their road map for the future.

A Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal, for instance, revealed that, “Doctors are increasingly confident that children are less affected by the new coronavirus than adults, a finding that could aid governments considering next steps in reopening economies.”

The Journal notes that a review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of 150,000 patients found that minors constituted only 1.7 percent of those infected. While there have been certain areas — Washington, D.C., for one — in which the percentage of children with the illness has been higher than expected, the CDC findings are consistent with “67 studies from across the world by a network of child-health experts” that concluded “children are far less-likely than adults to suffer gravely from COVID-19, with most showing few symptoms,” the Journal reported. “Available data shows only a tiny portion have succumbed and died.”

Some of these studies have also suggested another interesting detail, the paper observed: “That children may be less susceptible than adults to catching the virus at all, meaning they are less likely to spread it, too.” As a research fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at England’s University Hospital Southhampton put it, “The fear of these silent assassins in the community who don’t have any symptoms and are infecting everyone else — more and more evidence is consistently showing us that this is probably not the case.”

This should be highly relevant to Gov. Sisolak on a number of levels, particularly on decisions about August school openings, summer education options, day care and youth recreational facilities. The governor has many difficult decisions to confront; that is true. But it’s worth remembering that there’s ample “science” to support the controlled and gradual reopening of Nevada.