Blake Kimball led all scorers with 21 points in Unity's home game against Pontiac last Friday. His lights out shooting spree, which included three back-to-back treys, along with a 20-point performance from The Sentinel's first-ever basketball player of the week Brady Porter, was not enough to detour their team's 74-64 loss to the Indians.
Three players were responsible for the Rockets' 11 three-pointers during the game. Kimball heaved in four, Porter, who was the only player to reach double figures before the half, had five and Damian Knoll chipped another two.
Pontiac had three players in double figures.
Logan Barnett led the Indians' scoring with 20 points. The sophomore finished the contest 8-10 from the free throw line. Junior Alexander Trevino had a 17 point effort. Both players found themselves on the foul line often in the final quarter of play where Trevino hit four of his seven attempts and Barnett went 7-for-8.
Senior Matt Murphy rounded out the Pontiac's top three scorers with 11 points.
Tomorrow night the Rockets (0-4) host Ty Pence and the 2-0 St. Joseph-Ogden Spartans. In his last two games, Pence is averaging 32 points per game. He had a single-game career output scoring 40 against Oakwood last night and put 24 on the scoreboard against Rantoul on the previous Friday.
Unity will also honor its three seniors and their parents.
Fans unable to gain admittance can watch the varsity game at 8pm on the NFHS Network.
by Caroline Chen, ProPublica
Children as young as first graders may be able to get the coronavirus vaccine by the time school starts in September, presuming trials are successful in those age groups, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with ProPublica.
The manufacturers will need to prove vaccines are safe and effective in younger bodies. The adult trials paved much of the way, but researchers still need to study how kids’ immune systems react and to confirm the optimal dosage. And even if the shots are authorized by September, there will need to be enough supply on hand in order to get school children immunized before school doors open.
It’s essential to act expeditiously, O’Leary said. "I would love to see a vaccine available for all children in time for the next school year."
Why It’s Important to Vaccinate Kids Against COVID-19
Early on in the pandemic, some thought that children might be entirely immune. That's clearly been disproven. Out of more than 20 million U.S. cases where age information is available, about 2.2 million, or 11%, have been in children under 18. Some get very ill, though this is rare. As of Feb. 8, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tracked more than 2,000 cases of what’s known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a serious condition associated with COVID-19 that can result in cardiac dysfunction and kidney injury; 37% of the cases recorded were in Latino children and 32% in Black children.
It’s also become evident that children are capable of transmitting the virus to some extent. On one hand, kids aren’t superspreaders: COVID-19 is clearly dissimilar to influenza or the common cold virus, Vanderbilt’s Creech pointed out. “You put one of those in a classroom, then in a few days, it’s overrun,” he said. “That’s not what we see with COVID.” But exactly how infectious children are remains somewhat unclear, in part because schools have not been fully open, making it hard to gather data, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician and professor of global health and infectious diseases at Stanford University. Studies from other countries, while informative, may not always extrapolate well to the U.S., she added.
So while the "preponderance of data" points to children being less likely to infect people when compared with adults, "they certainly do," said O’Leary, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “So, if you’ve got vulnerable people in the household and your 7-year-old comes home with COVID, it’s not to say they can’t give it to anybody else. They absolutely can. It’s just a bit less likely.”
It’s important to note that the vaccines have only been proven — so far — to prevent disease and not infection (data on that is harder to gather and takes longer to prove), which means it’s not guaranteed yet that vaccinated individuals can’t spread the coronavirus.
But there are some inklings of hope that vaccination can at least reduce onward transmission. So if this bears out, the more people who are vaccinated in a community, including children, the more likely transmission will drop overall.
"Our current chaos about children not being in schools is just terrible for children, and I think a lot of the concern would be assuaged if children were immunized," said Dr. Sarah Long, professor of pediatrics at the Drexel University College of Medicine. "That doesn’t mean to me that they can’t get the infection or transmit it every once in a while, but it would reduce those possibilities tremendously."
Long is also a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, where she has been reviewing the trial data and helping to make recommendations on how the vaccines should be used. She continued: "There are real virus control reasons, there are real societal reasons and there are economic reasons, because if children can’t go to school, people can’t work."
O’Leary said children as young as 6 months, which is the youngest age that Moderna plans to test, can get vaccinated so long as trial data shows the vaccines to be safe and effective. Infants under 6 months are likely to be protected by antibodies transferred through the placenta if the pregnant mother is vaccinated, he added.
Some pediatricians and infectious disease experts said they were eager for pediatric studies to move faster.
"My understanding is that the entity formerly known as Operation Warp Speed had a lot of involvement with those adult trials, but with pediatric clinical trials, they’re not having the same degree of involvement," O’Leary said. "So it’s more up to the manufacturers, and from my perspective, these manufacturers don’t have the financial incentive to conduct these trials with the same urgency that they did with the adult trials."
Stanford’s Maldonado added that she’s concerned that there’s not as much pressure on the manufacturers to recruit children of diverse backgrounds as there was for the adult trials. "I think it’s important to get those kids in to understand factors around the actual vaccine and also to get buy-in of those communities where we’re seeing more hesitancy. We want to make sure they are feeling comfortable about being represented," she said.
While O’Leary is not as confident as Fauci that we’ll see Pfizer’s data on younger kids by September, he feels very optimistic about the availability of a vaccine in the coming months for kids as young as 12, who tend to get sicker than the younger age group.
"I think that’s a really big deal," he said.
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