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Corona has reached the children and adolescents.

In the capital, for example.

In the past calendar week, 283 cases per 100,000 inhabitants between the ages of ten and 14 were reported.

In the Neukölln district this incidence was as high as 395 and 420 in the middle.

Would you like more examples?

The number of new cases in the vulnerable age group 60 plus was 48,730 throughout Germany in the week before Christmas.

Last week, thanks to the vaccines, there were less than half as many, namely 22,388, despite the third corona wave.

The situation is quite different for the very young: the number of cases under the age of 15 was 12,615 in the week before Christmas - and in the previous week it was almost twice as high at 22,364.

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And so it continues at the moment.

According to the RKI figures published today, 1804 cases in the u15 area were reported yesterday - a hefty 37 percent more than a week earlier.

In the age group u5 there were 544, which means that the increase is even 64 percent.

Especially since the Easter holidays, cases among children and adolescents have become major drivers of the third corona wave in Germany.

The big problem is: We don't know why.

Are children and young people infected in daycare centers and schools?

Or is it not more a private game with friends, where the rules of distance and mask requirements may not be taken so seriously?

RKI is overwhelmed with assigning the cases

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The RKI cannot help.

Complete contact tracking is still the declared goal of the federal government - but recently the responsible federal authority could not even assign a tenth of the reported cases to a suspected site of infection.

There is no remedy in sight here - and certainly not that easy and quick to implement.

It is all the worse that the second major problem is not addressed either.

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So absolutely nothing is known about the share of the test being, which has been ramped up since March, in daycare centers and schools in the children's wave.

It is possible that only - or at least mainly - more cases are recorded among children and adolescents because more tests are carried out.

The suspicion is also obvious because Covid 19 disease is particularly often symptom-free in very young people.

To date, there are no reliable estimates of the number of unreported cases of corona infections in Germany.

It is only obvious that it was and is particularly high among children and adolescents.

Now suppose that so far the number of boys and girls who have become infected was four times as high as the number of detected cases;

And assuming that the increased number of tests means that the actual number is only twice as high as the reported one instead of four times - then the increase in the u15 age group in the past few weeks could be almost completely explained in this way.

Every fifth German citizen is already vaccinated

The prioritization of corona vaccinations should be lifted by June at the latest.

The manufacturers have promised 80 million vaccine doses for the current second quarter.

This is good news for all age groups, because the willingness to vaccinate is high.

Source: WORLD

Bringing light into the darkness here is an urgent task - for better, more targeted virus control.

But also to be able to better estimate where we actually stand in the pandemic.

This could be remedied relatively easily - through regular, well-documented and evaluated representative tests in day-care centers and schools, flanking the mass tests that are routinely carried out.

Then, a nice by-product, we could finally judge more precisely when and under what circumstances face-to-face care in day-care centers and schools is low-risk and when not.

We owe this to our offspring to research too.

It's just a shame that the federal government has refused to carry out representative corona tests for research purposes for more than a year.

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