Month: April 2020

Enlarge / NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MARCH 24: A child with a pacifier looks out a window as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States on March 24, 2020 in New York City. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11th. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Cindy Ord)

In all of the grim statistics of COVID-19’s devastation, one seemingly bright spot has been that children seem to be largely unaffected. They consistently make up small percentages of confirmed cases and nearly all have a mild form of the disease. But as more data accumulates, we’re getting a clearer picture of what COVID-19 looks like in children—and when its youngest victims are not spared from the worst.

On Monday, April 6, public health researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the first data set on pediatric COVID-19 cases in the United States. The report looked at more than 2,500 cases in infants, children, and adolescents under age 18, collectively referred to as “children” in the study. The data was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The data largely echoes that of pediatric cases seen in China and elsewhere. Children made up a sliver of COVID-19 cases overall and their symptoms appeared largely mild.

Enlarge (credit: Ben Shaw)

When people in New Guinea started tending crops like yam and fruits around 8,000 years ago, they transformed nearly everything about life on the island. By around 5,000 years ago, people had begun settling in houses supported by wooden posts. The farmers developed new kinds of cutting tools, and they carved stone pestles to prepare yams, fruits, and nuts. They also wove brightly-colored fabrics with dyed fibers, elaborate carved stone figures of birds, and traded across 800km of ocean for obsidian.

The details of daily life were uniquely New Guinea. But the big picture—more people, settled village life, new types of stone tools, and a sudden flourishing of symbolic art—might have been familiar to people from other early agricultural societies around the world. Together, those things are a bundle of cultural trends that archaeologists call Neolithic.

Until recently, archaeologists didn’t think New Guinea had developed its own Neolithic culture. Instead, many researchers thought all the trappings of Neolithic village life had arrived around 3,200 years ago with the Lapita, a group of seafaring farmers who came to the island from Southeast Asia. That’s because the few Neolithic artifacts that could be properly dated all seemed to come from after the Lapita arrived. But the people of the small highland village of Waim recently rewrote that narrative, with a chance discovery during a local construction project.