Okay.
Yes, going by the assumption that infected child contacts of a child index case were infected by the index case and not a common adult source, which the author assumes and I am willing to go with for the sake of the discussion, then kids are as efficient of transmitters to other children as adults are to adults. And the data is extremely clear very very poor at transmitting to adults. Also the data is very clear that children who are infected are almost always infected by an adult, not by another child. The graphs are there if you care to look at them.
By Jove you are right, the rate of infection in the youngest children is even lower in India compared to the U.S. that I attributed. In the extremely crowded child on top of child circumstance of these Indian provinces, the youngest children have FIVE times less infections than the youngest children in the U.S. From there the case incidence rate follows more or less in parallel up to the over 65 cohorts. To be precise:
0-4 years 5.3X more same age group in the less child crowded U.S. conditions (or times less in crowded Indian conditions if you prefer)
5-17 years 3.6X
18-29 years 4.2X
30-39 years 3.5X
40-49 years 3.8X
50-64 years 3.0X
65 to 74 years 2.6X
75 to 84 years 3.4X
85 plus years 9X more
Reported cases and deaths are not as concentrated in the 85 plus age cohort in India (where there are very few of that age) as they are in the United States. Shocking! Also per reported case more over 85 die in the U.S. Which is potentially interesting.
What’s this thread again? Oh yeah, “opening schools.” IF kids were drivers of infection into higher risk populations, or even to each other, then we’d expect to see particularly high rates among children especially in the most crowded conditions, and many infected adult contacts of child index cases.
INSTEAD we see absurdly LOW rates among the youngest children, and children 5 to 17 in India with low rates, almost exactly the same fraction of U.S. cases 30 to 39 and roughly the same comparative fraction (a very low absolute number) and in the middle of that multiple range for all adults 18 to 64.
INSTEAD we see infected contacts of child index cases almost exclusively being other children and very few infected contacts of child index cases being adults.
The hypothesis that children drive infections into adults in any meaningful way is falsified by these findings, at least in India.
The hypothesis that kids DO NOT spread infections to adults very much is supported.
The conclusion that the author makes as quoted about the paper (left as a “may” in the paper itself) that this shows kids are effective transmitters (to other children fairly exclusively) can be made on the assumption that every infected child contact of a child index was infected by the child index case and not by a shared adult contact, BUT is in conflict with the finding that child infection rates are not relatively increased in India compared to the United States and are, for the youngest cohort significantly lower, despite crowded Indian conditions.