A Generation-Defining Moment That Should Be Stopped
In one week, children in Japan will go back to school.
This is a horrible mistake.
Japan has lost any semblance of control related to containing COVID. The medical system is simultaneously underutilized and overwhelmed, a state that can only be attributed to the neutering and incapacitation of the highly effective bureaucracy that built it. Citizens and residents with COVID have been instructed to stay and recover at home, and as evidenced by recent untimely residential deaths, the sick are failing to receive timely and effective medical attention.
As new COVID cases eclipse 20,000 per day, those with “non-severe” cases have been told to recover at home.
There are 35.8 million old folks in Japan, 65 and older. They’re 28.4% of the 126 million people living in Japan, and to-date, Japan’s vaccination efforts have results in 81.6% of them getting fully vaccinated. On the surface, getting the oldest and presumably the most susceptible to the virus vaccinated sounds like good news. In reality, we have a much, much bigger problem looming.
Only 32.9% of the population is fully vaccinated. This leaves 84.5 million Japan either partially or completely unvaccinated, including 74.5 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 years old (59.15% of the total population), and over 15.6 million children age 0-14, the remaining 12.4%. In the time it took for Japan to roll out the vaccination to its elderly, the virus continued unabated transmission and mutation, and it’s now confirmed that over 95% of all new cases are caused by the Delta variant of the virus, a mutation that is significantly more contagious, generates 1000X (TIMES, not percentage) new virus, and as a result causes far worse sickness faster. (All age data above via Statista.)
Delta is confirmed to infect children as readily as adults, unlike the original, ancestral virus strain from 2020 that children seemed to be largely unaffected by. Which brings us to why returning to school right now is a dangerous mistake.
Delta does not need super-spreader events to accomplish the same result. Already, we are seeing the rapid development of clusters in elementary schools, junior and high schools and colleges in Japan and across the world. Once a single infected child contracts the COVID delta variant, he or she creates 1000X more virus in 3-4 days of gestation and begins spreading it to others, fast. This happens before symptoms set in. Within a matter of days an entire school can become infected.
Even before a percentage of those children manifest symptoms and become sick, they have now spread the virus throughout their home and to all the members of their family, who then spread the virus at work, within their social circles, and even to extended family, all before showing symptoms. By the time the cluster at school is identified, it’s too late.
Reopening schools now is the most effective and efficient way to ensure Delta spreads to the entire unvaccinated and vaccinated population of Japan.
The immediate impact of allowing schools to reopen is making a terrible situation exponentially worse. Medical and emergency resources are already overwhelmed with 20,000 daily cases. With the speed and intensity of delta variant, It’s not difficult to see 200,000 daily cases around the corner. The population is sufficiently unvaccinated to support this happening very fast. And this leads to a much bigger problem in the future.
Long COVID in children
While the virus rampages on through populations, the focus is on vaccinating as fast as possible. With a sufficiently vaccinated population, we can overpower the virus, and hopefully COVID becomes nothing more than the new influenza, a pain in the butt to deal with each year, but like influenza A and B, something we can live with, vaccinate against regularly, and no longer fear intubation and death as infrequent but common outcomes. The trouble is, a vaccine is not yet available for anyone age 0-12. And they are getting COVID and, after recovering, Long COVID.
What is Long COVID? Via Nature.com last month:
Most people who survive COVID-19 recover completely. But for some, the poorly understood condition that’s become known as long COVID can last for months — maybe even years. Nobody yet knows.
The condition was first described in adults. But several studies have now reported a similar phenomenon, including symptoms such as headache, fatigue and heart palpitations, in children, even though they rarely experience severe initial symptoms of COVID-19.
The long-term impact of long COVID is still unknown, but already we are seeing emotional and physical side effects.
At present, we have no idea whether 1% of children or 10% of children will experience Long COVID symptoms for months or years, but that’s the key point: We don’t know. Paediatrician Danilo Buonsenso, at the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome, is convinced that 5–10% of those with COVID-19 could develop Long COVID. Studies of children infected in Rome during early and mid-2020 may not present the same results as children infected by the delta variant today. And we do not know what is coming next with a largely unvaccinated population that is still the perfect human lab to produce the next mutant.
Long term psychological distress is the real concern. Children already suffering from a variety of symptoms of anxiety and depression could now face physical symptoms and side effects of the disease itself for months, maybe years. The emotional and mental pressure of this, and its long-term impact on Japanese society, could be significantly worse than the near-term social, medical and economic impact we are all experiencing.
The first global convergence of generational experience (Is not good)
In the United States, social psychologists and cultural anthropologists often classify generations based on the defining event of their lives. Most psychology professional say that, for me, as a GenX kid, my defining event was in fourth grade when the Space Shuttle blew up, killing everyone on board. GenX, many experts say, is more cynical, distrusting, and nomadic than prior generations. As latch key kids growing up with the cold war and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation on our minds, it’s not difficult to see why. Many believe the defining moment for my parents, who were Baby Boomers, was the moon landing, or perhaps the Kennedy assassination. For Millennials, it was the destruction and devastation of the Twin Towers. For Gen Z, who are presently between kids and teens in school, it’s unclear what their defining moment - or characteristic will be.
Japan organizes and labels generations somewhat differently. Like many things Japanese, there’s much more emphasis on what can be quantified and measured than what a generation feels. And, yes, you guessed it: Economic performance is the bar. In Nippon.com’s article Japanese Generations: Boom, Bubble, and Ice Age, employment, education and overwork related to the economic boom, the bubble and the subsequent and continued lost decades are the defining characteristics of the generational divides. Only recently, but infrequently, Japanese are beginning to mention the qualitative characteristics of a generation born and raised in economic stagnation. In fact, they are beginning to refer to some of the younger generation as Millennials (ミレニアル世代), borrowing the term from the United States.
The experiences of Japanese children born and raised in the economic bubble and in the United States’ during the Cold War couldn’t be more different. When I was a child growing up in California, our elementary school teachers conducted emergency drills. “Everyone, get under your desks, arms around the back of your neck, and put your head between your legs,” teachers would say, and invariably one of the kids would finish the instruction out loud, “and KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE!” Yup, those are my peeps. GenX.
COVID, however, is a global problem.
For the first time, the children of Japan’s lost decades and the children of American millennials are facing a problem arguably more disturbing than an economic crisis or any terrorist attack in recent memory. These children are being sent back into traditional schools as the Delta variant tears through the population. They are surrounded by grossly unvaccinated populations. And they, more than any of us, and certainly more than the geriatric leadership of our countries, have the most to lose from the long-term physical and emotional toll of long COVID.
This doesn’t have to happen. There are many problems to tackle in stopping COVID-19. For this one, the immediate actions are clear:
Close schools until the population is fully vaccinated.
Invest in non-traditional learning universally.
give children and Their parents who need extra support the resources they need to Survive and Succeed.