Canadian health-worriers like "we need mask mandates back!" and like, yes, pediatric respiratory disease is in a surge this year that is already far exceeding hospital capacity and if not somehow suppressed will see many children die who within capacity were saveable.
At the same time, last time we gave those public health types an inch they took a mile. Remember "two weeks to flatten the curve"?
Inch store's closed.
they also caused it themselves by suppressing pediatric infections for two years, with the implicit idea of eternal public health tyranny, so
Eh, a lot of the naive “immunity debt” stuff is as if an immune system that just hasn’t been taxed in general will be weaker against any particular infection, and that’s not really how it works
Now, immune systems need exposure to some particular virus to develop antibodies against it, a lot of childhood illnesses work like you’ll probably catch it at some point in your first 7 years or so and then as your immune system learns to produce antibodies you recover and it won’t be an issue for the rest of your life
And keeping kids home from congregate settings like (pre)school might mean they didn’t get specific things in those years so they all get them at once when they go back, with this delay weakening the herd immunity that sees things go in localized waves when the vulnerable pop gets high enough and then dying out when enough get it and develop immunity that reduces the local vulnerable population below sustainability
So I could see that explain some of more infections at once than usual, but not the infections being particularly aggressive and debilitating, like we’re hearing. I do suspect it’s Covid. “Long Covid” is it spreading from initial “beachhead” in the lungs, which are often where infections arrive and set up to be good at clearing themselves out, to other systems.
And symptoms vary with exactly where it spreads to. My first case, which spread to the nerves and brain, presented totally differently than the second which somehow affected the blood sugar->ATP pipeline (in the bloodstream? In the pancreas screwing up insulin?), causing fatigue.
And so it’s believable that some kids had it spread in a way that undermined their immune system, and wasn’t noticed in the absence of other disease but as we approach the winter and respiratory diseases go around they’re more vulnerable.
I suspect this is what happened to Jair Bolsonaro, too, why he’s caught stuff constantly since his first Covid case. I also think the delayed appearance is also similar to reports of increased strokes and heart attacks in the year after Covid, as in some people it spread to the heart or blood vessels in ways that didn’t directly kill at the time but rendered them less resilient to lethal stressors from then on.